Henno Martin

Henno Martin (15 March 1910 – 7 January 1998) was a German professor of geology who, along with Hermann Korn, lived for two and a half years in the Namib Desert to avoid internment during the Second World War.

[1] His studies at the universities of Bonn, Zürich, and Göttingen culminated in a Ph.D on "Post-Archean Tectonics in Southern Central Sweden".

In 1940, fearing internment as enemy aliens by the South African government, Martin and Korn decided to flee into the Namib desert and to wait out the war in the remote and rugged Kuiseb Canyon.

Martin discovered the Messum crater in 1939,[4] the Namibian remainder of a gigantic volcanic eruption that happened before Africa and South America broke apart.

He selected the locations of boreholes throughout South-West Africa and particularly in the capital Windhoek, where he "provided the city with its first large-scale, reliable source of water".