Johannes Benzing (born in Schwenningen on 13 January 1913; died 16 March 2001)[1][2] was a German Turkic specialist and diplomat in the era of National Socialism and in the Federal Republic of Germany.

At the Humboldt University of Berlin, Benzing studied Islamic philology with Richard Hartmann, Hans Heinrich Schaeder and Walther Björkman, and Turcology with Annemarie von Gabain, and Mongolistics with Erich Haenisch.

Besides his diplomatic duties, Benzing gave courses in Turkic languages at the Turcological Department of the Faculty of Letters (Turkish:Edebiyat Fakültesi) of the University of Istanbul.

Benzing always dealt with the written word in a highly economic way and communicated many of his boldest – and perhaps most fruitful – ideas in oral discussions only, without ever committing them to paper.

Soon after the retirement, he and his wife Käte left Mainz and settled in the borough of Erdmannsweiler in Königsfeld im Schwarzwald, close to their birthplace in the Black Forest.

With his profound knowledge and wide perspective, Benzing continued the tradition of Willi Bang-Kaup's Berlin school of linguistic Turcology, though broadening its scope and refining its scholarly working procedures.

A selection of these reviews: Critical contributions to ancient literature and Turkology (German: Kritische Beiträge zur Altaistik und Turkologie), appeared in 1988 as volume 3 in the series Turcologica magazine (Harrassowitz).

One example of this is Benzing's critical occupation with the so-called Altaic question, the still controversial problem of a possible genetic relatedness of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic (maybe even Korean and Japanese).