Walter Bruno Henning (August 26, 1908 – January 8, 1967) was a German scholar of Middle Iranian languages and literature, especially of the corpus discovered by the Turpan expeditions of the early 20th century.

Walter Henning was born in the ancient fortress town of Ragnit, East Prussia (now Neman, Russia), but grew up in Köslin in Pomerania on the Baltic Sea.

At Göttingen, Henning was—together with Paul Thieme, Walther Hinz, Kaj Barr and Hans Jakob Polotsky—among the last group of students of Friedrich Carl Andreas, chairman of the faculty for Western Asian languages (German: Lehrstuhl für Westasiatische Sprachen), acknowledged authority on Middle Iranian literature and guiding force behind the analysis of the Turfan manuscripts.

Independently of Andreas' Nachlass, Henning published Ein manichäisches Bet- und Beichtbuch, the first major publication of the difficult Sogdian language texts.

These lectures, which contributed to the dismissal of the respective theories of Henrik Samuel Nyberg and Ernst Herzfeld (both of whom had written books that misrepresented hypotheses as fact) and the eventual isolation of both, realigned the tone and direction of Iranian Studies towards scientific research, and away from extravagant speculation that had beset the field in the previous decades.

In 1950, and at the invitation of the Iranian government, Henning spent several months doing field-work in Iran, where he was the first to make several tracings of Pahlavi rock-face inscriptions at (otherwise) inaccessible locations.

He found the administrative duties irksome and the damp of English winters tiresome, so in September 1961 he accepted a position as Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.