People
Historical Figures and Influential People in History
Explore rulers, generals, thinkers, scientists and reformers who shaped world history. Search for a specific person, or browse by era, region, country and A–Z.
Industrial Age Figures from Germany
Use the filters on the right to narrow the figure index while keeping the main results in view.
7 results
Adolf Hitler
1889–1945Europe
He turned a failed coup and a prison sentence into a path to absolute power, and the world spent a decade wondering if he could be reasoned with.
Open profile →
Friedrich Ebert
1871–1925Europe
He became Germany's first democratic president in a revolution he didn't want, crushed the uprisings that threatened it, and died before he could see what was coming next.
Open profile →
Gustav Stresemann
1878–1929Europe
Gustav Stresemann was a German statesman who stabilised the Weimar Republic and reshaped its foreign relations through pragmatic diplomacy after the First World War.
Open profile →
Heinrich Himmler
1900–1945Europe
He was a failed chicken farmer who became the most feared man in Nazi Germany — running the SS, the Gestapo, and the machinery of the Holocaust with the orderliness of a bureaucrat.
Open profile →
Kaiser Wilhelm II
1859–1941Europe
He believed himself to be a great statesman, dismissed the chancellor who actually was one, and spent thirty years inadvertently helping cause the worst war Europe had ever seen.
Open profile →
Karl Marx
1818–1883Europe
He spent his life in poverty writing about the workers' revolution, died before it happened, and his ideas were used to justify revolutions he never imagined by leaders he would never have trusted.
Open profile →
Paul von Hindenburg
1847–1934Europe
He was a war hero and a president who despised Hitler, considered him a vulgar upstart — and then appointed him chancellor anyway, convinced he could control him.
Open profile →