Millionaire To Go On Trial

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31986, 13 May 1969, Page 17

Millionaire To Go On Trial

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

KARLSRUHE (West Germany), May 12.

A West German Marxist millionaire, Hannsheinz Porst, and two of his former employees will go on trial in Karlsruhe today charged with having treasonable relations with East Germany’s intelligence bureau.

The 46-year-old businessman, who built his father’s Nuremberg photography shop into one of the country’s largest mail order houses, and his two co-defendants —51-year-old Alfred Pilny, and Peter Neumann, aged 47, will be tried by the Federal Court presided over by six judges. If found guilty, all three might face a five-year prison term.

Porst is alleged to have fed information on West German politics to East German intelligence contacts for 10 years. But he denies ever having given away State secrets at meetings with East German officials. He says he was trying to bring East and West Germany closer together. In newspaper interviews he said he was a member of both East Germany’s Communist Party and West Germany’s Free Democratic Party because he wanted to “keep a

hole open in the wall” erected by both sides of Germany.

Although details of the charges against the three defendants have not been published. the State prosecutor has said that Pilny was a professional East German agent who came to the West as a refugee in 1955. Neumann, who like Pilny held a leading position in one of Porst’s subsidiary companies, was allegedly recruited by Porst. The Judge will have to tackle 13 bulging files of investigation findings which also contain evidence on a fourth man alleged to be involved. He is Hans-Kurt Findeisen, said to be an important East German contact man.

He worked for six years in a Munich industrial concern until disappearing to East Germany the day Porst and Pilny were arrested in October, 1967.