Oswald Hanfling, (December 21, 1927 October 25, 2005) was a German philosopher. Oswald Hanfling was born to in Berlin in 1927. His parents were Jewish and when their business was vandalised on Kristallnacht in 1938, he was sent to England by Kindertransport and lived in Bedford with a foster family. After the war, he traced his family to Israel, with the help of the Red Cross. Hanfling left school at the age of 14 to become an "office boy". For the next 25 years he worked in business, eventually running his own employment agency for au pairs. He told his students that he picked up the English language through reading comics as a young boy.