Walter Markov

Walter Karl Hugo Markov was a German historian. Shortly after he received his doctorate, a promising academic career was interrupted in 1934 when he joined the Communist Party and briefly became a resistance activist. In 1935 he was sentenced to twelve years in prison, but ten years later in April 1945, as the Hitler regime collapsed, he was one of a number of long-term inmates from the Siegburg jail who organised their own "self-release", with the help of two pistols that he had been able to purchase, already loaded, on the prison black market.