WALTER BINGHAM played a role in some of the most important chapters of the 20th century – and his story is not yet over at the age of 100.
After the horror of being a Holocaust refugee, he vowed to live life to the fullest.
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He achieved his dream of parachuting at age 95, learned to fly and appeared as a wizard in three Harry Potter films.
Walter is also the oldest journalist in the world and shows no signs of slowing down despite his age.
“On a good day, I feel like I’m still in my 40s,” he says.
Walter, who took part in the Normandy landings during World War II and helped arrest one of Hitler’s right-hand men, led the annual March of the Living this week.
It is an event that takes thousands of people to walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau, in Poland, to remember the six million Holocaust victims murdered by the Nazis.
It was a poignant moment for Walter who, while working for British Intelligence, came face to face with Hitler’s most important man in Europe, Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Hitler passed
Sitting at the table opposite the man who persuaded Germany’s wartime allies to hand over the Jews for extermination, he asked him: “What did you know about the Holocaust?”
Walter said: “He was handsome and spoke good English.
“I asked him: ‘What can you tell me about the final solution’ and he said: ‘I don’t know anything about that – that was all from the Führer’.
“I could have wrung his neck.”
Walter was a ten-year-old Polish Jew living in Karlsruhe, Germany, near the French border, when Hitler came to power in 1933.
He remembers watching book burnings in a nearby park and seeing Hitler passing by his house in a motorcade, giving a Nazi salute.
Over the next three years, as anti-Semitism grew, Walter was subject to extreme bullying at school.
He was spat on, called a “dirty, smelly Jew” and forced by teachers to sit at the back of the class, away from the “Aryan” children.
Eventually, his parents sent him to a Jewish school, run in a dilapidated building, in the nearby city of Mannheim in southwestern Germany.
It was a move that would save his life.
When the Germans began arresting Jewish men and arrested his father, Sigmund, a printer, in his home in October 1938, Walter was 33 miles away at school.
His father would later die in the Warsaw ghetto, one of around 1,500 Karlsruhe Jews who died during the Holocaust.
Walter’s mother, Sofi, arranged for him to be sent to Britain in what became known as the Kindertransport program.
The British government allowed around 10,000 Jewish children to flee to the United Kingdom, but did not take in their parents.
On July 25, 1939, Walter was placed on a train at Karlsruhe railway station by his mother, a moment that will forever be etched in his mind.
He said: “I had no idea if I would see my mum again, but I was 15 and I knew why I was going.
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“The little ones on the train had no idea what was happening. They thought they were being sent away for punishment. Many shouted “Mommy, Mommy” at the windows.
“Later, a friend told me how he pushed his baby’s stroller to the station and then pushed it home empty. He saved lives, but it was terribly cruel to separate parents from children.”
Upon arriving in Britain, Walter was housed with other refugees at Gwrych Castle in Abergele, Conwy, where he spent three years with other Jewish children.
“It was a lovely castle from the outside,” he says.
“But inside it was completely run down, with no electricity or real sanitation.
“One day they told us that war had broken out and that was it.”
In 1944, Walter, now in his early twenties, joined the British Army as a member of the 43rd Territory of Wessex and took part in the Allied invasion of Normandy, landing on Juno Beach as an ambulance driver.
I didn’t know if my mother had survived the war, but we met with the help of charities. When we separated, I was a boy. Now I was a man in uniform
Walter
He said: “I remember storms kept us off the beaches for many days and one of the boats struck a mine, killing those on board. We finally landed on Juno Beach, where most of the enemies had already been pushed back, and began our advance towards Caen.”
Walter’s 103rd Brigade was involved in the battle for Hill 112, an important strategic stronghold that allowed the Allies to retake Caen and continue the liberation of Europe.
On one mission, Walter’s ambulance was knocked out by German fire, wounding his group and killing another officer.
But he braved gunfire to save injured soldiers and was later awarded the medal for “gallantry in the field” by King George VI.
He would later also receive France’s highest award, the Legion D’honneur.
As a German speaker, Walter knew he could do more to help the war effort and was transferred to the Supreme Allied Command, led by US General Dwight D Eisenhower.
He worked as a document expert, analyzing captured German documents.
Rising quickly through the ranks, he was then transferred to London where he was trained in counter-intelligence in a secret office in Oxford Circus.
diaper factory
“There was a big department store and under the roof was a secret office,” he said later.
When the war ended, Walter was sent to the Nazi offices in Hamburg, Germany, to find documents that would help prove that members of the regime participated in the Holocaust.
When Hitler’s Foreign Minister Ribbentrop was arrested in Hamburg in June 1945, Walter was brought in to help interrogate him.
Ribbentrop, who had a can of poison strapped to his body when he was discovered, refused to take any blame for the deaths of millions of people.
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Walter said: “He sat right in front of me and denied knowing everything. When I asked him how he knew about the Holocaust, he said he had read it in the newspapers. When I asked if he could take a photo, he asked if he could shave first.”
Walter was 22 years old at the time, but he had already been through more than most people experience in a lifetime.
Ribbentrop, a former German ambassador to Britain who helped negotiate a deal to occupy and divide Poland with Russia before the two went to war, was hanged after the Nuremberg Trials.
Walter left the Army in 1947 and settled in St John’s Wood, London.
Through the Red Cross, he was finally reunited with his mother, Sofi, who had been deported from her home in Germany in the early 1940s and worked in labor camps before ending up in Copenhagen.
It was a happy meeting, but a little strange for Walter.
He said: “I didn’t know if Mum had survived but we found each other with the help of charities. When we separated, I was a boy, but now I was a man in uniform.”
Having seen so much horror in war, most would have been happy to live the rest of their lives in peace.
But not Walter.
He barely sits still and his desire for life becomes clear during our interview.
Postwar, he took a job in journalism, writing for a Jewish newspaper and magazines and broadcasting on Sound Radio.
Recordist
Walter also opened a diaper factory, but it closed in the mid-60s when disposable versions became popular.
In the same decade he learned to fly a private plane in Elstree, Herts, and qualified to transport people on night flights.
When a friend joked that he should take up modeling after growing a long beard, Walter got an agent and appeared in non-speaking roles as a wizard in two of the Harry Potter films, The Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets.
In 2000, he applied to be Santa Claus at Harrods and got the job.
The 80-year-old father-of-one went to live in Israel, joining his daughter Sonja after his wife Lilli died aged 70 in 1990.
She was a Jewish refugee from Vienna and they met in the early 1950s in a café.
Today, he contributes to a magazine in Israel and hosts a radio show.
He holds the Guinness World Records entry for oldest working journalist.
Walter said: “Every day something happens in the world and I remain interested and engaged in life.
“Besides, I guess I was lucky to have good genes.”
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