Walter N. Sanning is the pen name of the author of The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, published by the Institute for Historical Review.
Sanning is a scholar and businessman who was born in 1936 into an ethnic German family in an area that for decades was a part of the former Soviet Union. After a childhood in wartime Germany, he migrated in the 1950s to the United States, where he met his wife. He graduated from a prominent Pacific Northwest university with a bachelor's degree (high honors) in business.
With a scholarship, he was a graduate student at an East Coast Ivy League university, where he concentrated on international business, finance and economics. He then taught business, finance and economics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at a major West Coast university. The Sanning family moved to Germany in 1970, where he then worked for years for a major financial institution.
After teaching for some years at a prominent West Coast University, in the 1970s he went into private business, and assumed a leading position. He has devoted considerable time and effort to research in US and German archives. He is married, and speaks English and German. He and his wife have four children, all of them born in the United States.
His paper, "Soviet Scorched-Earth Warfare: Facts And Consequences," presented at the Sixth IHR Conference (1985), was published in the IHR's Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1985.
Of his book, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, Dr. Arthur R. Butz wrote: "This book is the first full length serious study of World War II- related Jewish population changes... This book presents the fundamentally correct account of the subject... [In this work] the simplistic legends that have petrified postwar thought on the Jewish aspect of World War II are dealt another of the many blows they have received in recent years."