Walter Donovan

Walter Donovan was a wealthy American industrialist and collector of antiquities who allied himself with the Nazis in order to obtain the Holy Grail, which he sought for its fabled gift of immortality.

Around 1938, Donovan hired Professor Henry Walton Jones, Senior in order to track down the missing part of his Grail tablet, a marker to the Grail's resting place, but when Jones learned that his Austrian assistant, Elsa Schneider, was in fact an enemy agent, the Nazis took him prisoner. Donovan subsequently hired Jones' son, Indiana, to continue his father's work. However, Jones eventually managed to free his father from Castle Brunwald and escape from Donovan's clutches.

After the Joneses and their friends reached the Temple of the Sun in the Republic of Hatay behind Donovan and the Nazis, the industrialist shot the elder Jones to force his son into braving the traps protecting the relic. Donovan and Schneider followed him to the Holy Grail but found that there was a lethal final test: to recognize the true artifact hidden among the many fakes.

Donovan deferred to Schneider's expertise, but she betrayed him with a False Grail that rapidly aged the industrialist to the extent that all that remained of Walter Donovan was his Nazi pin, a symbol of his misplaced loyalties.