List of people from Breslau

This list includes people who were born in or lived in Breslau before 1945. For a list of famous residents after 1945, see List of notable people from Wrocław.

• Alois Alzheimer - discoverer of Alzheimer's disease
• Günther Anders - philosopher and journalist
• Adolf Anderssen - 19th-century chess master
• Đorđe Andrejević-Kun - painter
• Heinz Arndt - Australian economist
• Bertha Badt-Strauss - writer
• Boleslaw Barlog - stage and film director
• Max Berg - architect, designer of Centennial Hall
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Lutheran clergyman, religious leader in the resistance movement against Nazism
• Max Born - physicist
• August Borsig - entrepreneur
• Ernst Cassirer - philosopher
• Ferdinand Cohn - biologist
• Louis M. Cohn - suspected of starting the Great Chicago Fire
• Richard Courant - mathematician
• Jan Dzierżon - apiarist
• Norbert Elias - sociologist
• Friedrich Karl Georg Fedde - botanist
• Otfrid Förster — neurosurgeon
• Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat - virologist
• Zecharias Frankel - rabbi and founder of Conservative Judaism
• Felix Hausdorff - mathematician, one of the founders of algebraic topology
• Martin Helwig - cartographer, created the first map of Silesia
• Johann Heß - Lutheran theologian, Protestant reformer of Breslau and Silesia
• Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau - Baroque poet
• Karl Eduard von Holtei - poet and actor
• E. A. J. Honigmann - Professor of English Literature
• Heinz Hopf - mathematician (topologist)
• Vernon Ingram - biologist
• Alfred Kerr - theatre critic and essayist
• Gustav Robert Kirchhoff - physicist
• Gerhard Kittel - New Testament scholar and philologist
• Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) - conductor
• Wojciech Korfanty - political activist
• Arthur Korn - physicist, invented transmission of photographs by facsimile and wireless
• Arthur Korn - architect and town planner
• Carl Ferdinand Langhans - architect
• Carl Gotthard Langhans - architect
• Ferdinand Lassalle - socialist politician and reformer
• Carl Friedrich Lessing - artist
• Daniel Casper von Lohenstein - poet and diplomat
• Peter Lorre - actor
• Rudolf Meidner - economist and socialist theorist
• Joachim Meisner - Cardinal priest and archbishop of Cologne
• Adolph von Menzel - artist
• Jan Mikulicz-Radecki - surgeon, contributed to development of modern surgery
• Richard Mohaupt - German-American composer and Kapellmeister
• Edda Moser - soprano opera singer
• Svika Pick (born 1949) - Israeli pop singer and composer
• Hugo von Pohl - German admiral, commander of High Seas Fleet
• Louis Prang - printer, lithographer and publisher
• Manfred von Richthofen - World War I flying ace (the "Red Baron")
• Oskar von Riesenthal - ornithologist, forester, author
• Julius von Sachs - botanist
• Johann Gottfried Scheibel - theological professor and dissenter to the Prussian Union
• Friedrich Schleiermacher - theologian and philosopher
• Margarethe Siems - operatic soprano
• Angelus Silesius - 17th-century religious poet
• Edith Stein - philosopher and Roman Catholic martyr
• Michael Steinberg - music critic
• Fritz Stern - historian
• Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben - Inspector General of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War
• Siegbert Tarrasch - chess player
• Augustin Theiner - theologian and Church historian, Prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives
• Michel Thomas - war hero and language teacher
• Christian Wolff - philosopher
• Johann Heinrich Zedler (1706–1751) - publisher of a German encyclopedia, the Grosses Universal-Lexicon

Nobel laureates

listed by year of award

• Theodor Mommsen (1902)
• Philipp Lenard (1905)
• Eduard Buchner (1907)
• Paul Ehrlich (1908)
• Gerhart Hauptmann (1912)
• Fritz Haber (1918)
• Friedrich Bergius (1931)
• Erwin Schrödinger (1933)
• Otto Stern (1943)
• Max Born (1954)
• Reinhard Selten (1994)