[2] Gerhart Hass was born in Berlin roughly two years before the Nazis took power and transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship.
By the time he left school in 1949 half of Berlin and a large area surrounding the city were being administered as the Soviet occupation zone.
His dissertation was a study of "the development of differences between American and German imperialisms on the eve of the Second World War (1938–1939)":[3] his supervisors for the work were Leo Stern and Werner Basler.
His higher level doctorate ("Promotion B") was received in 1970 in return for a piece of work on "The Second World War in the confrontation between both social systems".
The project addressed German policy on these matters through the interpretational prism of Lenin's Theory of Imperialism and of Dimitrov's thesis of fascism.
One attraction of providing information to the Stasi for ambitious professional people was the possibility of gaining increased influence in the work place.