Horst Faas - Telegraph Among Faas's most celebrated protégés was Huynh Thanh My, an actor turned photographer who was killed in 1965, one of more than 70 journalists to die in the course of the 15-year war. Under Faas's mentorship, My's younger brother, Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his famous picture of a badly burned Vietnamese girl fleeing an aerial napalm attack. His fellow AP photographer Eddie Adams was only yards from the agency's bureau in Saigon when he took the war's most famous picture, of Vietnam's national police chief executing a captured Viet Cong suspect in the street. Faas was a shrewd planner, and could secure journalistic scoops by anticipating "not just what happens next but what happens after that," as one colleague put it. When the Vietnam War ended, Faas sought to put the whole experience behind him, returning there professionally only once, in 1978, and subsequently as a tourist. He said his mission had been to "record the suffering, the emotions and the sacrifices of both Americans and Vietnamese in ... this little bloodstained country so far away." Horst Faas was born in Berlin on April 28 1933. Like all young German men growing up during the Second World War, he was obliged to join the Hitler Youth organisation. Years later, he wrote that Allied air raids and "the fascinating spectacle of anti-aircraft action in the sky" were part of daily life, as was being required "to stand at attention in school and listen to an announcement that the father or older brother of a classmate had died for Fuehrer and Fatherland." In the closing days of the war in 1945, the Faas family fled to avoid the Russian advance on Berlin and two years later made their way to Munich, where, during the post-war Allied occupation, Horst, aged only 15, played the drums with a black GI jazz band. He began his career in Munich in 1951 at the Keystone photo agency, joining the Associated Press as a photographer in 1956. In 1960, when he was 27, Faas began his front-line reporting career in the Congo, then covered the conflict in Algeria. In 1962 he was reassigned to Vietnam. For a time he shared a villa in Saigon with the New York Times correspondent David Halberstam, who considered Faas "a genius." Faas left Saigon in 1970 to become AP's roving photographer for Asia, based in Singapore. He also covered the 1972 Munich Olympics and photographed a Palestinian terrorist wearing a ski-mask on the balcony of the building where Israeli athletes were being held hostage. In the same year Faas won a second Pulitzer Prize, with Michel Laurent, for his pictures of torture and executions in Bangladesh. In 1976 Faas moved to London as AP's senior photo editor for Europe, remaining there until his retirement from the news agency in 2004. In 1998 the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, presented Faas with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Picture Editors" Guild. In later life Faas organised reunions of the wartime Saigon press corps and ran international photojournalism symposiums. At one such event in Hanoi in 2005, he became ill and was flown to a hospital in Germany, where doctors diagnosed a spinal haemorrhage and told him he was permanently paralysed from the waist down. With the British freelance photographer, Tim Page, Faas was co-editor of Requiem (1997), a book about photographers killed on both sides of the Vietnam War. Faas also co-wrote Lost Over Laos (2003), the story of four photographers shot down in Laos in 1971 and the search for the crash site 27 years later. Horst Faas is survived by his wife, Ursula, and their daughter. Horst Faas, born April 28 1933, died May 10 2012