Walter Hallstein

Walter Hallstein was a German academic, diplomat and statesman who was the first President of the Commission of the European Economic Community and one of the founding fathers of the European Union.

Hallstein began his academic career in the 1920s Weimar Republic and became Germany's youngest law professor in 1930, at the age of 29. During World War II he served as a First Lieutenant in the German Army in France. Captured by American troops in 1944, he spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in the United States, where he organised a "camp university" for his fellow soldiers.