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.
Historical Figures from Germany
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9 results
Adolf Hitler
1889–1945Industrial Age
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.
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Anne Frank
1929–1945Modern History
She spent two years hidden behind a bookcase writing about ordinary life — and what she wrote became one of the most read books in history.
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Friedrich Ebert
1871–1925Industrial Age
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.
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Gustav Stresemann
1878–1929Industrial Age
Gustav Stresemann was a German statesman who stabilised the Weimar Republic and reshaped its foreign relations through pragmatic diplomacy after the First World War.
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Heinrich Himmler
1900–1945Industrial Age
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.
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Johannes Kepler
1571–1630Early Modern Era
He used his rival's painstakingly collected data — data the rival had died trying to protect — to prove that the planets moved in ellipses, not the perfect circles the universe was supposed to use.
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Kaiser Wilhelm II
1859–1941Industrial Age
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.
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Karl Marx
1818–1883Industrial Age
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.
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Paul von Hindenburg
1847–1934Industrial Age
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.
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