Ansbach - Notable People

Notable People

• Albert of Prussia, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order and the first duke of Prussia.
• In the late 16th century, the physician to margrave Georg Friedrich was the famous botanist, Leonhart Fuchs.
• Ansbach was home of the astronomer Simon Marius, who observed Jupiter's moons from the castle's tower. Later he claimed to be the discoverer of the moons, which led to a dispute with the true discoverer, Galileo Galilei.
• Ansbach was the birthplace of the early chemist, Georg Ernst Stahl.
• Queen Caroline, consort of King George II of Great Britain was born in Ansbach in 1683.
• Two poets, Johann Peter Uz (1720–1796) and August von Platen-Hallermünde (1790–1835), were also born there.
• Ansbach was the birthplace of the pre-Linnean botanist, Georg Christian Oeder.
• John James Maximilian Oertel (1811–1882), born in Ansbach, was a Lutheran clergyman who later converted to Roman Catholicism, became a professor of German at Fordham University in the United States, and later edited and founded several newspapers in the United States, including one that would become the leading German-language newspaper in the county, Baltimore's Kirchenzeitung.
• Also the Bavarian Major General and War Minister Moritz Ritter von Spies (1805–1862) was born in Ansbach.
• Kaspar Hauser lived in Ansbach from 1830 to 1833. He was murdered in the palace gardens.
• Theodor Escherich, bacteriologist and paediatrician, born in Ansbach in 1857. Bacterial genus Escherichia (for example, Escherichia coli) was named after him in 1919, eight years after his death.
• Hermann Fegelein SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler's Adjutant and Adolf Hitler's brother in law was a great admirer of his birthplace, Ansbach.
• Pinchas Kohn was the last rabbi of Ansbach. He was the rabbinical advisor to the German occupying forces of Poland in the First World War and was also one of the founders of the World Agudath Israel movement.
• George H. Brickner, U.S. Representative from Wisconsin.