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
• Leopold Auerbach - anatomist and neuropathologist
• Bertha Badt-Strauss – writer
• Boleslaw Barlog – stage and film director
• Erhard Bauschke (1912–1945), was a German jazz and light music reedist and bandleader
• 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
• Harri Czepuck - journalist
• Walter Damrosch – conductor
• Jan Dzierżon – apiarist
• Hermann von Eichhorn - Prussian field marshal
• Norbert Elias – sociologist
• Eduard Vogel von Falckenstein (1797-1885), Prussian general
• Friedrich Karl Georg Fedde – botanist
• George Wolfgang Forell (1919–2011) was a world-renowned scholar, author, lecturer and guest professor
• Otfrid Förster — neurosurgeon
• Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat – virologist
• Zecharias Frankel – rabbi and founder of Conservative Judaism
• Hans Freeman – biochemist
• Alfred Gomolka – politician (SPD)
• Felix Hausdorff – mathematician, one of the founders of algebraic topology
• Martin Helwig – cartographer, created the first map of Silesia
• George Henschel – conductor and singer
• Johann Heß – Lutheran theologian, Protestant reformer of Breslau and Silesia
• Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau – Baroque poet
• August zu Hohenlohe-Öhringen - general
• 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
• Michael Oser Rabin – mathematician and computer scientist
• Manfred von Richthofen – World War I flying ace (the "Red Baron")
• Oskar von Riesenthal – ornithologist, forester, author
• Ludwig Rosenfelder (1813-1881) - German painter
• Horst Rosenthal (1915–1942) – German-born French cartoonist
• Julius von Sachs – botanist
• Johann Gottfried Scheibel – theological professor and dissenter to the Prussian Union
• Friedrich Schleiermacher – theologian and philosopher
• Auguste Schmidt, educationist and feminist
• 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)