Walter Hallstein

Walter Hallstein lived from 1901 to 1982 and was a German legal academic, diplomat and statesman. He became one of Germany youngest law professors at age twenty nine during the Weimar Republic before serving as a first lieutenant in the Wehrmacht in France during the Second World War, after which he was held as a prisoner of war. Returning to academia after the war, he was recruited into diplomacy in 1950 and became a key architect of European integration, helping to establish the European Coal and Steel Community and negotiating the Treaty of Rome. He served as the first president of the European Economic Community Commission from 1958 to 1967, a tenure that ended after his push for federal European structures clashed with French President Charles de Gaulle more intergovernmental approach in the Empty Chair Crisis.