[4] He earned his Ph.D. in 1964 from Goethe University Frankfurt, under the supervision of Reinhold Baer.
[1] After having resigned from his position at Monash University, he returned to Germany and took up a research fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
[6][7] Shortly afterwards Graham Higman and John McKay demonstrated that such a group exists, using a computer.
There is a much later paper by Jörg Hrabe de Angelis showing the existence and uniqueness of the Held group.
[8] Up to 2001, Held was professor at the Mathematics Institute of Gutenberg University in Mainz.