Walter Bingham: The World’s Oldest Journalist

When Walter Bingham emigrated to Israel at 80 years old, he tried to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces. “They wouldn’t take me,” he joked at a gathering in Jerusalem last month to recognize Holocaust Day of Remembrance.

Now 102, Bingham still possesses that youthful drive that belies his years. In April 2021, Guinness World Records bestowed on him the title of oldest journalist and radio talk show host, and Bingham still reports stories—many of which showcase his beloved adopted country. Bingham also regularly presents about the Holocaust, and he worries that today’s Jews face dangers similar to what he experienced during his youth in Nazi Germany.

Born Wolfgang Billig in Karlsruhe, Germany, Bingham experienced Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies even in elementary school. “My grades went down while the boy who copied my work received high grades,” he said. First, the teacher ignored him when he raised his hand to answer a question, then he was moved to the back of the class. The school eventually expelled him, and he attended a Jewish school staffed with highly qualified Jewish teachers fired from Nazi-run schools.

At 9 years old, Bingham saw fellow Germans hold a book burning for books by or about Jews. He watched them sing as they threw the volumes into the fire, and he saw the fire department watch to ensure German property didn’t accidentally catch fire as the Jewish books burned. “People had to take the books from their shelves and bring them in,” he said. “If they didn’t, they would get in big trouble.”

The Nazis later arrested Bingham’s father and expelled him to Poland. He hid in pigsties and barns but was eventually deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, where he died of disease. When Bingham was 15, his mother sent him out of the country on the Kindertransport. He was one of the oldest children.

Bingham later served as an ambulance driver in the British army. “I never killed anyone, I only saved lives,” he said. Before the D-day invasion of Normandy, he changed his name to Walter Bingham to avoid being recognized as a Jew if he was captured. King George VI later awarded Bingham the Military Medal.

Toward the end of the war, Bingham received training as an intelligence officer due to his native German-speaking ability. As a 22-year-old, he interviewed Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister and a Nazi war criminal. “He thought it was an interview for publication and asked if he could shave first, for the picture,” Bingham said.

Bingham asked Von Ribbentrop what he knew about Hitler’s Final Solution. “He denied everything,” Bingham said. “He said it was the Führer’s idea and that he only read about it in the newspapers. … Complete nonsense, of course!” Von Ribbentrop was the first to be executed at the Nuremberg trials.

After the war, Bingham was disoriented and, like many survivors, traumatized. He kept six bank accounts in six different countries—“just in case,” he said later. In 1946, seven years after he left Germany on the Kindertransport, he was reunited with his mother, who had been rescued from the Terezin concentration camp. He learned that, four weeks before the end of the war, Himmler had allowed the Swedish Red Cross to rescue Scandinavian Jews, who picked up his mother as well: “It was an act of God,” Bingham said.

Back in England after the war, Bingham married another Holocaust refugee from Vienna in 1950. They had one daughter, Sonja. Bingham responded to an ad in the paper and became a phone operator for a local London radio program. To supplement his income, he took on additional jobs as an actor and model; his striking natural beard landed him roles in the Harry Potter movies as a wizard and as Santa Claus in ads for the British mall Harrods. Before long he hosted his own radio show, focusing on Jewish issues and human interest stories. For one story, he spent several hours in disguise as a homeless man on the street.

At age 80, after his wife of 40 years died, he fulfilled his lifelong dream to immigrate to Israel. “Now, when I leave this country, Jerusalem is like a magnet—it pulls me back,” he said.

In Israel, he applied for a journalism job in 2004 but was rejected since he was past the mandatory retirement age. But Bingham did not give up. He later found journalism work in his new country. He now hosts two weekly radio programs, Walter’s World and The Walter Bingham File, writes for The Jerusalem Post, and remains a regular presence at media tours and news conferences across Israel. In 2018, when he was 94, France bestowed on him its highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur for his participation in the invasion of Normandy.

Bingham’s love for Israel undergirds everything he does. “This is my country,” he says. “I want to support it.” He describes his radio work as “painting pictures in sound.” He has broadcast from the control tower at Ben Gurion Airport, recorded from the cockpit of an Israeli El Al plane, and reported from the Hula Valley among migrating birds. He ends every radio broadcast with an appeal to his listeners to visit their elderly neighbors.

Bingham says that attacks on Jews and the burning of synagogues echo the period preceding the Holocaust. In its Antisemitism Worldwide Report 2025, Tel Aviv University reports record levels of anti-Semitic violence, with 20 Jewish victims in 2025—the highest in over three decades. It also shows a significant increase in physical assaults across multiple regions worldwide, with the overall number of anti-Semitic incidents notably higher than before Oct. 7, 2023, and record-high incident numbers in Australia and Canada.

On Oct. 8, 2023, a day after the Hamas invasion into southern Israeli border communities, Bingham and two other survivors traveled to Germany to retrace the itinerary of the Kindertransport that saved their lives. But a Free Palestine demonstration blocked their way in Amsterdam. “We couldn’t get out of the railway station,” he said.

Bingham regularly brings props to his public presentations to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive: a soft black calf-leather Nazi boot and a Hitler Youth dagger engraved with a swastika and the words Blut und Ehre (“blood and honor”). His message to younger Jews worldwide is direct: “Come to Israel while you still can—with your possessions—before you have to run away with only a small suitcase like I did.”