100 Notable alumni of Kiel University

Dr. Erhard Hübener was a German politician and member of the German Democratic Party (DDP) until 1933. After World War II he engaged in rebuilding structures of self-rule in the Soviet occupation zone and was a co-founder and member of the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (LDPD).

Jost de Jager is a German business consultant, politician and former Schleswig-Holstein Minister of Science, Economic Affairs and Transport.

Carl Eduard Sachau was a German orientalist. He taught Josef Horovitz and Eugen Mittwoch.

Michael von Abercron is an agricultural engineer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who served as a member of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2021.

Dayan Kodua is a German actress, author and model of Ghanaian descent. In 2001, she became the first and only black woman to win a beauty contest in Germany. She has starred in a number of American and German movies and was honored ambassador for the African continent in Germany in 2005.

Max Tau was a German–Norwegian writer, editor, and publisher.

Gabriel Riesser was a German politician and lawyer.

August Mau was a German art historian and archaeologist who worked with the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut while studying and classifying the Roman paintings at Pompeii, which was destroyed with the town of Herculaneum by volcanic eruption in 79 AD. The paintings were in remarkably good condition due to the preservation by the volcanic ash that covered the city. Mau first...

Rolf Rendtorff was Professor of Old Testament at the University of Heidelberg from 1963 to 1990. He was one of the more significant German Old Testament scholars from the latter half of the twentieth-century and published extensively on various topics related to the Hebrew Bible. Rendtorff was especially notable for his contributions to the question of the origins of the...

Herbert Giersch was a German economist. He was one of the initial members of the German Council of Economic Experts in 1964, serving on the council until 1970, and also was president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy 1969–1989. Giersch was considered the most influential German economist during the chancellorships of Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Helmut Kohl.

Delara Burkhardt is an Iranian-German politician of the Social Democratic Party who has been serving as a Member of the European Parliament since 2019.

Bernhard Ernst von Bülow was a Danish and German statesman. He was the father of German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow.

Ingbert Liebing is a German lobbyist and former politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He served as a member of the Bundestag from 2005 until 2017, where he represented Nordfriesland – Dithmarschen Nord. From 2014 until 2017, he was the chairman of the CDU state party group of Schleswig-Holstein.

Otto Jahn was a German archaeologist, philologist, and writer on art and music.

Heinrich Rose was a German mineralogist and analytical chemist. He was the brother of the mineralogist Gustav Rose and a son of Valentin Rose. Rose's early works on phosphorescence were noted in the Quarterly Journal of Science in 1821, and on the strength of these works, he was elected privatdozent at the University of Berlin from 1822, then Professor from...

Heiko Braak is a German anatomist at the Clinical Neuroanatomy Section, Department of Neurology, Center for Biomedical Research, University of Ulm, Germany. He has received awards for his work on Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson’s disease. Braak and his colleagues described disease progression in terms of six different stages, each involving abnormal pathology in particular neurological structures. The type and severity...

Christian Andreas Victor Hensen was a German zoologist and marine biologist (planktology). He coined the term plankton and laid the foundation for biological oceanography and quantitative studies.

Georg Waitz was a German medieval historian and politician. Waitz is often spoken of as the leading disciple of Leopold von Ranke, though perhaps he had more affinity with Georg Heinrich Pertz or Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann. He concentrated on medieval German history.

Gerald H. Haug is a German geologic climatologist, prize winner of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and since 2007 he has a professorship at the ETH Zürich in Switzerland. In 2015 he became director of the Climate Geochemistry Department and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz and since March 2020, he became the new President...

August Leskien was a German linguist who studied comparative linguistics, particularly relating to the Baltic and Slavic languages.

Hans-Walter Peters is a German banker. He is the current spokesman of the personally liable partners (i.e. head) of Berenberg Bank and the president of the Association of German Banks, the main lobby group for Germany's financial sector.

Julius Oppert (9 July 1825 – 21 August 1905) was a French-German Assyriologist, born in Hamburg of Jewish parents.

Anka Feldhusen is a German diplomat. Since July 2019 she is Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Johann Eduard Erdmann was a German religious pastor, historian of philosophy, and philosopher of religion, of which he wrote on the mediation of faith and knowledge. He was known to be a follower of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom he studied under August Carlblom, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he regarded as his mentor. Erdmann also studied the works of Karl...

Helmut Lemke was a German politician of the NSDAP and CDU, and Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein (1963–1971). He was born in Kiel and died in Lübeck.

Julius Curtius was a German politician who served as Minister for Economic Affairs (from January 1926 to December 1929) and Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic (from October/November 1929 to October 1931).

Lothar Bolz was an East German politician. From 1953 to 1965 he served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of East Germany (GDR).

Ömer Bolat is a Turkish academician and politician. He has made contributions to the fields of economics, international relations, and business administration throughout his career. Bolat became the minister of trade of the 67th cabinet of Turkey.

Metin Hakverdi is a German lawyer and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag for the Hamburg-Bergedorf – Harburg district since the 2013 German federal election.

Wolfgang Haken was a German American mathematician who specialized in topology, in particular 3-manifolds.

Gustav Frenssen was a German novelist. He wrote patriotically about his native country and promoted Heimatkunst (regionalism) in literature.

Heinrich Krone was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Lauritz Lauritzen was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He was born in Kiel and died in Bad Honnef.

Oskar Heinroth was a German biologist who was one of the first to apply the methods of comparative morphology to animal behavior, and was thus one of the founders of ethology. He worked, largely isolated from most other scientists of the period, at the Berlin Aquarium where he took care of fishes, reptiles and birds, especially waterfowl, before he was...

Stephan Lars Andreas Brunner Neibig is a Costa Rican politician and economist who served as the first vice president of Costa Rica from 2022 to 2025. He assumed office on 8 May 2022.

Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, was a German jurist and musician.

Julius Friedrich August Bahnsen was a German philosopher. Bahnsen is usually considered the originator of characterology and a real-dialectical method of philosophical reflection which he laid down in his two-volume Contributions to Characterology (1867) and developed forth with his following works, amongst others his magnum opus The Contradiction in the Knowledge and Being of the World (1880/82).

Cristina Dorador Ortiz is a Chilean scientist, doctor, and former assembly member of the Chilean Constitutional Convention who conducts research in microbiology, microbial ecology, limnology and geomicrobiology. She is also an Associate Professor in the department of biotechnology of the Faculty of Marine Sciences and Natural Resources at the University of Antofagasta.

Henrik Steffens, was a Norwegian philosopher, scientist, and poet.

Sabine Sütterlin-Waack is a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). She currently serves as State Minister of the Interior, Municipal Affairs, Housing and Sports in the State of Schleswig-Holstein.

Daniel Pauly is a French-born marine biologist, well known for his work in studying human impacts on global fisheries and in 2020 was the most cited fisheries scientist in the world. He is a professor and the project leader of the Sea Around Us initiative at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. He...

Britt Marie Hermes is an American former naturopathic doctor who became a critic of naturopathy and alternative medicine. She is the author of a blog, Naturopathic Diaries, where she writes about being trained and having practiced as a licensed naturopath and about the problems with naturopaths as medical practitioners.

Gustav Adolf Graf von Götzen was a German explorer, colonial administrator, and military officer who served as Reichskommissar of German East Africa. He came to Rwanda in 1894 becoming the second European to enter the territory, since Oscar Baumann’s brief expedition in 1892, and later, he became the first European to cross the entire territory of Rwanda.

Otto Heinrich Kranzbühler was a German naval judge who represented defendant Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials.

Bärbel Höhn is a German politician for Alliance '90/The Greens. She was elected to the Bundestag in the 2005 national elections, after serving as State Minister of Agriculture of North Rhine-Westphalia from 1995 to 2005.

Alice Bota is a German journalist, presently working for the weekly Die Zeit, and a book author. Born in Poland, she studied in both Germany and Poland and focuses on topics of Eastern Europe.

Erich Köhler was a German politician. He was the first president of the Bundestag from 7 September 1949 to 18 October 1950.

Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was a German philosopher and philologist.

Richard Wilhelm Heinrich Abegg was a German chemist and pioneer of valence theory. He proposed that the difference of the maximum positive and negative valence of an element tends to be eight. This has come to be known as Abegg's rule. He was a gas balloon enthusiast, which caused his death at the age of 41 when he crashed in...

Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller, KCMG was a German-Australian physician, geographer, and most notably, a botanist. He was appointed government botanist for the then colony of Victoria, Australia by Governor Charles La Trobe in 1853, and later director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. He also founded the National Herbarium of Victoria. He named many Australian plants.

Johann Bernhard Basedow was a German educational reformer, teacher and writer. He founded the Philanthropinum, a short-lived but influential progressive school in Dessau, and was the author of "Elementarwerk", a popular illustrated textbook for children.

Johannes Friedrich August von Esmarch was a German surgeon. He developed the Esmarch bandage and founded the Deutscher Samariter-Verein, the predecessor of the Deutscher Samariter-Bund.

Hans-Peter Bartels is a German politician of the SPD who served as member of the Bundestag for Kiel. From 2015 until 2020, he was the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces.

Otto Paul Hermann Diels was a German chemist. His most notable work was done with Kurt Alder on the Diels–Alder reaction, a method for cyclohexene synthesis. The pair was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1950 for their work. Their method of synthesizing cyclic organic compounds proved valuable for the manufacture of synthetic rubber and plastic. He completed his...

Gyde Jensen is a German politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) who served as a member of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2025.

Karl August Fritz Schiller was a German economist and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). From 1966 to 1972, he was Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and from 1971 to 1972 Federal Minister of Finance. He was the inventor of the magic square, depicting Economic equilibrium, and of the Concerted activity (Konzertierte Aktion) to reflate the German market. He...

Luise Amtsberg is a German politician of Alliance 90/The Greens who has been a member of the German Bundestag since the federal election in 2013. She has represented the constituency of Kiel since 2025.

Lann Hornscheidt is a German academic active in the fields of gender studies and linguistics. Hornscheidt is non-binary.

Peter Harry Carstensen is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). From 2005 to 2012 he was Minister President of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, serving as President of the Bundesrat in 2005/06.

Feridun Zaimoğlu is a German author and visual artist of Turkish descent.

Barthold Georg Niebuhr was a Danish–German statesman, banker, and historian who became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography. By 1810 Niebuhr was inspiring German patriotism in students at the University of Berlin by his analysis of Roman economy and government. Niebuhr was a leader of the Romantic era and symbol of German...

Otto Fritz Meyerhof was a German physician and biochemist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.

Frederik Paulsen OBE is a Swedish billionaire businessman and non-executive chairman of Ferring Pharmaceuticals.

August Karl Gustav Bier was a German surgeon. He was the first to perform spinal anesthesia and intravenous regional anesthesia.

Walter Eucken was a German economist of the Freiburg school and father of ordoliberalism. Ordoliberalism was based on the concept of social market economy balancing free markets with regulatory oversight. The Walter Eucken Institut was founded four years after his death and his ideas influenced West Germany’s economic policy.

Lorenz von Stein was a German economist, sociologist, and public administration scholar from Eckernförde. As an advisor to Meiji period Japan, his liberal political views influenced the wording of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan as well as major constitutional thinkers such as Rudolf von Gneist.

Heide Simonis was a German author and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). She was minister of finance in Schleswig-Holstein from 1988 until 1993, when she became minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein. She was the first woman to serve as head of a state government in German history and the only woman to do so in the 20th century, serving until...

Marcel Fratzscher is a German economist and professor at Humboldt-University of Berlin. Since February 2013 he has been president of the Berlin-based economic research institute DIW Berlin. He was previously head of International Policy Analysis at the European Central Bank. He also teaches International Finance in the Ph.D. programme in Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt.

Hans Luther was a German politician and Chancellor of Germany for 482 days in 1925 to 1926. As Minister of Finance he helped stabilize the Mark during the hyperinflation of 1923. From 1930 to 1933, Luther was head of the Reichsbank and from 1933 to 1937 he served as German Ambassador to the United States.

Franz Oppenheimer was a German sociologist and political economist, who published also in the area of the fundamental sociology of the state.

Wolfgang Kubicki is a German politician of the Free Democratic Party of Germany (FDP) who has been vice chairman of the FDP since December 2013.

Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician and archaeologist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest classicists of the 19th century. He received the 1902 Nobel Prize in Literature for his historical writings, including The History of Rome, after having been nominated by 18 members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He...

Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, in Leerhafe, Wittmund, East Frisia is a German orthopedist and sports physician.

Daniel Günther is a German politician who is a member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). Since 28 June 2017, he has served as the Minister President of Schleswig-Holstein. From 1 November 2018 to 31 October 2019, he served as President of the Bundesrat, being succeeded by Dietmar Woidke.

Carl Clauberg was a German gynecologist who conducted medical experiments on Jews and Roma at Auschwitz concentration camp. He worked with Horst Schumann in X-ray sterilization experiments at Auschwitz concentration camp.

Peer Steinbrück is a German politician who was the Chancellor-candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the 2013 federal election. Steinbrück served as the eighth Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2002 to 2005, a member of the Bundestag from 2009 to 2016, and as Federal Minister of Finance in the first Cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2005 to...

Gerhard Delling is a German television presenter and sports journalist.

Gerhard Stoltenberg was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and minister in the cabinets of Ludwig Erhard, Kurt Georg Kiesinger and Helmut Kohl. He served as Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein from 1971 to 1982 and as President of the Bundesrat from 1977 to 1978.

Jürgen Ludwig Drews is a German schlager singer.

Axel Prahl is a German actor, voice actor and musician.

Wilhelm Heinrich Solf was a German scholar, diplomat, jurist and statesman.

Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist, atomic spy, and communist who supplied information from the American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II. While at the Los Alamos Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and, later, early models of...

Kurt Alder was a German chemist and Nobel laureate.

Gerhard Johannes Paul Domagk was a German pathologist and bacteriologist.

Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt was a German neurologist and neuropathologist. Although he is typically credited as the physician to first describe the Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, this has been disputed. He was born in Harburg an der Elbe and died in Munich.

Alexander Ferdinand Koenig was a German naturalist and zoologist. Making use of the family wealth earned from the sugar business, he went on collection expeditions and founded what is now known as the Museum Koenig in Bonn in 1912.

Edzard Schmidt-Jortzig is a German jurist. He currently holds the chair for public law at the University of Kiel. A member of the Free Democratic Party, he served as Federal Minister of Justice in the Fifth Kohl cabinet between 1996 and 1998.

Helmut Hasse was a German mathematician working in algebraic number theory, known for fundamental contributions to class field theory, the application of p-adic numbers to local class field theory and diophantine geometry (Hasse principle), and to local zeta functions.

Albrecht Wellmer was a German philosopher at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Wolfgang Benz is a German historian and antisemitism researcher. He was professor and the director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism of the Technische Universität Berlin from 1990 to 2011. He is considered to be one of the most renowned and well-known historians in modern Germany, and one of the foremost scholars on antisemitism studies. He has been referred...

Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen was a German theoretical physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, known as the Uranium Club, where he contributed to the separation of uranium isotopes. After the war, Jensen was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. He was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Institute for...

Hans Theodor Woldsen Storm, commonly known as Theodor Storm, was a German-Frisian writer and poet. He is considered to be one of the most important figures of German realism.

Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht was a German economist, banker, politician, and co-founder of the German Democratic Party. He served as the Currency Commissioner and President of the Reichsbank during the Weimar Republic. He was a fierce critic of his country's post-World War I reparations obligations. He was also central in helping create the group of German industrialists and landowners that...

Juliane Margaret Beate Koepcke, is a German-Peruvian mammalogist who specialises in bats. She is the daughter of German zoologists Maria and Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke.

Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard was a Hungarian–German experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1905 for his work on cathode rays. This work led to his experimental realization of the photoelectric effect, discovering that the energy (speed) of the electrons ejected from a cathode depends only on the frequency and not the intensity of light.

Franz Uri Boas was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.

Günter Blobel was a Silesian German and American biologist and 1999 Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell.

Hans Gustav Adolf Hellmann was a German theoretical physicist.

Peter Wilhelm Lund was a Danish-Brazilian paleontologist, zoologist, and archeologist. He spent most of his life working and living in Brazil. He is considered the father of Brazilian paleontology as well as archaeology.