Peter Scholl-Latour

Peter Scholl-Latour was born on March 9, 1924 in Bochum, Germany as Peter Roman Scholl-Latour.

Having a mother with Jewish background and thus suspicious to the national socialists (under the so-called Nuremberg Laws he was considered to be a Mischling, a "crossbreed" of first degree), his parents baptized him as a Catholic and sent him to the Jesuit Collège Saint-Michel in Swiss Freiburg. When his parents were forbidden to keep transferring money to Switzerland he had to quit the Collège and return to Germany in 1940.

In his book Living with France, he gives account of how, after France was liberated from German occupation in 1944, he chose to sign up with the French army. Since he failed to reach French controlled territory at Metz, he decided to join Tito's Partisan army, but was arrested in the region of Steiermark in Austria and subsequently put in a Gestapo prison. After he was freed, Scholl-Latour was a member of the Commando Parachutiste Ponchardier from 1945 to 1946, a unit of French paratroopers, with whom he fought in the First Indochina War.

Before he started his journalism studies, he served with a French Paratrooper outfit in the French Indochina War (1945/46).

He was a writer and director, known for Peter Scholl-Latour berichtet (1971), Das Schwert des Islam (1991) and Die Rächer Lumumbas: Eine Kongo-Reportage (1964). He was married to Eva Schwinges and Gertrud Knies.

On August 1973, he was taken captive along with some colleagues by the Vietcong forces while working as the chief correspondent for the German TV channel ZDF. He was released a week later unharmed.

At the beginning of the Iranian Revolution, he interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini on the flight bringing him back from Paris to Tehran (1979).

In 2008 he visited East-Timor, the only country on the planet he hadn't visited before.