Henno Martin’s account of how he and fellow German geologist Hermann Korn hid in the Namib Desert for more than two years during the Second World War to avoid internment – a South West African survival classic.
Afrikaans translation by S. Vivier of Wenn es Krieg gibt, gehen wir in die Wüste (1956). Published by Tafelberg-Uitgewers, Kaapstad: first Afrikaans edition 1959; this copy is the second edition, first printing 1980.
A hardcover in good secondhand condition – please see photos for condition details.
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Henno Martin was a German geologist, born on 15 March 1910 in Freiburg im Breisgau. He moved to South West Africa, now Namibia, in 1935, and during the Second World War hid with a fellow German geologist, Hermann Korn, in the Kuiseb Canyon of the Namib Desert for more than two years to avoid internment as an enemy national, an ordeal he later described in his memoir The Sheltering Desert, published in Afrikaans as Vlug in die Namib. After the war he worked as a consulting geologist, credited with finding Windhoek's first reliable large-scale water supply, directed Namibia's Geological Survey for twenty years, and later held a professorship at the University of Göttingen.
Martin died on 7 January 1998 in Göttingen, Germany, at the age of 87.
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