Pulitzer Prize-winning war photographer

Horst Faas, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning war photographer who later was editor of The Associated Press staff in Saigon that produced the most haunting photographs of the Vietnam War, died Thursday in Munich. He was 79.

Faas covered wars in Congo and Algeria in the late 1950s before being sent to Vietnam in 1962. Though wounded in a rocket attack in 1967, he remained in what he called “this little bloodstained country” until 1973, shortly before the U.S. withdrawal.

Faas earned Pulitzers in 1965 for combat photographs from Vietnam and in 1972 for his coverage of the conflict in Bangladesh.

But the photographs that came to be most closely associated with Faas were two that he selected, as an editor, for transmission around the world.

The first, taken by Eddie Adams in 1968, showed a Vietnamese official, his pistol at arm’s length, executing a captured Viet Cong soldier at point-blank range.

The second, taken in 1972 by the Vietnamese photographer Huynh Cong Ut, known professionally as Nick, showed the aftermath of one of the thousands of bombings in the countryside by U.S. planes: a group of children fleeing the scene, a young girl in the middle of the group screaming and naked, her clothing incinerated by burning napalm. The photograph won a Pulitzer.

Faas was born in Berlin on April 28, 1933, and like young men of his generation, he told interviewers, he was forced to join the Hitler Youth organization in his neighborhood. He said his overarching childhood memories were of food shortages, evacuations and “the fascinating spectacle of anti-aircraft action in the sky” as Allied planes dropped bombs.

Faas’ survivors include his wife, Ursula, and his daughter, Clare Faas.