Hans-Sieghard Petras

Hans-Sieghard Petras (* 1934 in Silesia ) is a German chemist and former GDR industrial spy.

In 1945, as a child, Petras fled from the Russians with his mother to Clausthal-Zellerfeld in the western Harz. When his two brothers moved to Berlin to study there, he joined them and attended the high school boarding school on the island of Scharfenberg in Tegeler See. When its director Heinrich Scheel went to the east, Petras followed him with about 30 other classmates to the school boarding school Himmelpfort in Brandenburg , where he graduated from high school in 1952 . In 1954 he began studying chemistry at the University of Göttingen . In 1963 he received his doctorate with the dissertation "On the constitution of the peptide part of actinomycins C1, C2, X2, X0b and X0d". He worked at Schering on preparing the production of the main active ingredient for the contraceptive Anovlar .

Economic spy of the GDR

During a visit to his brother, who was living in the GDR in 1964, he was approached by employees of the MfS in a restaurant in Treptow and asked specifically for information on the synthesis of ovulation inhibitors . In an interview from 2011 Petras justified his motives by saying that it would not harm anyone but would help the people in the GDR. He then copied rules for each synthesis step and brought them with him to the GDR when his brother visited. Another important private motive was to help his two sisters-in-law, who had eight or five children and urgently needed safe contraception. In fact, Jenapharm then used a progestin combination from Merck . After this action he wanted to get out, but was pressured to continue. He revealed the recipe for Trevira fiber when he later became the production director of a Hoechst subsidiary in Vlissingen , the Netherlands . When MfS officer Werner Stiller threatened to be exposed as an unofficial employee "Brocken" in January 1979 , he fled to the GDR with his wife and three children. In his absence, Petras was sentenced in 1983 to a fine of 42,000 D-Marks by the Frankfurt am Main Higher Regional Court for treason .

Activity in the GDR

After his escape, Petras became section director for materials technology at the University of Merseburg . In 1983 he completed his habilitation and was offered a chair in polymer chemistry at the Humboldt University in Berlin . This area was dissolved after reunification in 1991 and Petras was given early retirement.

literature

• Werner Stiller: The agent. My life in three secret services. Ch. Links Verlag , Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-592-8 ( limited preview of the 2nd edition 2012 in the Google book search)
• Annette Leo , Christian König : The »dream child pill«. Female experience and state birth policy in the GDR . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1655-3 ( limited preview in Google book search)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Specimen copy DNB 481907890 at the German National Library .
2. ↑ Annette Leo , Christian König : The "dream child pill". Female experience and state birth policy in the GDR . Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1655-3
3. ↑ Joachim Sauer , in Nachrichten aus der Chemie 59 (2011): The Torn East and the Successful Reunification ( Memento from November 23, 2019 in the Internet Archive )