Inside life of WWII vet, 100, who fled Nazis as kid, helped nail Hitler’s top man & starred in Hollywood franchise
WALTER BINGHAM played a part in some of the 20th Century’s most momentous chapters – and his story is still not finished at the grand old age of 100.
After the horror of being a Holocaust refugee, he vowed to live life to the full.
He fulfilled his dream of skydiving at 95, learned how to fly and appeared as a wizard in three Harry Potter movies.
Walter also happens to be the world’s oldest working journalist 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 Two and helped nail one of Hitler’s right-hand men, this week led the annual March Of The Living.
It is an event that sees thousands of people 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 top man in Europe, Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Hitler drove past
Sitting across the table from the man who persuaded Germany’s wartime allies to hand over Jews for extermination, he asked him: “What did you know about the Holocaust?”
Walter said: “He was good-looking 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 the Fuhrer’.
“I could have wrung his neck.”
Walter was a ten-year-old Polish Jew living in Karlsruhe, Germany, near the French border when Hitler rose to power in 1933.
He recalls watching book burnings in a nearby park and seeing Hitler drive past his home in a motorcade, performing a Nazi salute.
Over the next three years, as anti-Semitism grew, Walter was subjected to extreme bullying at school.
He was spat on, called a “dirty stinking 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 from a dilapidated building, in the nearby town of Mannheim in South West Germany.
It was a move that would save his life.
When the Germans started rounding up Jewish men and came to arrest his father Sigmund, a printer, at home in October 1938, Walter was 33 miles away at school.
His dad would later perish in the Warsaw ghetto, one of around 1,500 Karlsruhe Jews who died during the Holocaust.
Walter’s mum Sofi arranged for him to be sent to Britain on what became known as the Kindertransport programme.
The British government allowed around 10,000 Jewish children to escape to the UK but would not take in their parents.
On July 25, 1939, Walter was put on to a train at Karlsruhe railway station by his mum, which is a moment that is forever seared in his mind.
He said: “I had no idea whether I would see my mother again, but I was 15 so I knew why I was going.
“The little ones on the train had no idea what was happening. They thought they were being sent away for punishment. Many were crying, ‘Mummy, Mummy’ at the windows.
“One friend later told me how he pushed his baby’s pram to the station then pushed it home empty. It saved lives but it was terribly cruel to separate parents from children.”
On arriving in Britain, Walter was housed with other refugees in 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 totally dilapidated with no electricity or real sanitation.
“One day we were told that war had broken out and that was that.”
In 1944 Walter, now in his twenties, joined the British Army as a member of the 43rd Wessex territorials and was part of the Allied invasion of Normandy, landing on Juno Beach as an ambulance driver.
I didn’t know if mum had survived the war but we found each other with help from charities. When we parted, I was a young boy. Now I was a man in a uniform
Walter
He said: “I remember storms kept us back from the beaches for many days and one of the boats hit a mine, killing those onboard. We eventually landed on Juno Beach, where most of the enemies had already been pushed back and we started our push towards Caen.”
Walter’s 103 brigade were involved in the battle for Hill 112, an important strategic stronghold that allowed the Allies to retake Caen and continue the liberation of Europe.
In one mission, Walter’s ambulance was knocked out by German fire, wounding his group and killing another officer.
But he braved gunfire to save wounded soldiers and was later awarded the medal for “bravery in the field” by King George VI.
He would later also be awarded France’s highest accolade, the Legion D’honneur.
As a German-speaker, Walter knew he could do more to help the war effort and was moved to the Supreme Allied Command, led by US General Dwight D Eisenhower.
He worked as a document specialist, analysing captured German documents.
Quickly climbing the ranks, he was then transferred to London where he was trained in counter-intelligence at a secret office in Oxford Circus.
Nappy factory
“There was a big department store and under the roof was a secret office,” he later said.
When the war ended, Walter was sent to the Nazis’ offices in Hamburg, Germany to find paperwork that helped prove members of the regime took part in the Holocaust.
When Hitler’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Ribbentrop was arrested in Hamburg in June 1945, Walter was brought in to help question him.
Ribbentrop, who had a canister of poison strapped to his body when discovered, refused to take any blame for the deaths of millions.
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’d read it in the papers. When I asked him if I could take a photo, he asked if he could shave first.”
Walter was 22 at the time but 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 carve up 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 mum Sofi, who had been deported from her German home in the early 1940s and worked in labour camps before ending up in Copenhagen.
It was a joyous yet slightly awkward meeting for Walter.
He said: “I didn’t know if Mum had survived but we found each other with help from charities. When we parted I was a young boy but was now a man in a uniform.”
Having seen so much horror in the war, most would have been happy to quietly live out the rest of their lives.
But not Walter.
He barely sits still and his lust for life is clear during our interview.
Post-war, he got a job in journalism, writing for a Jewish newspaper and magazines and broadcasting on Sound Radio.
Record breaker
Walter also opened a nappy factory but it went out of business in the mid-Sixties as disposable versions became popular.
The same decade he learned to fly a private plane at Elstree, Herts, and qualified to transport people in night flights.
When a friend joked he should start modelling after he grew 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 become Santa at Harrods and got the job.
At 80, the 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 Fifties in a coffee shop.
Today, he contributes to a magazine in Israel and hosts a radio show.
He holds the Guinness World Records entry for the oldest working journalist.
Walter said: “Every day there’s something going on in the world and I stay interested and engaged in life.
“Also, I think I have been lucky to have good genes.”