List of Famous people named Karl

Karl Maria Alois Rawer was a German specialist in radio wave propagation and the ionosphere. He developed the analytical code to determine suitable frequency ranges for short wave communication by which German forces built-up their long distance communications during World War II.

Karl August Nerger was a naval officer of the Imperial German Navy in World War I, who achieved fame and recognition during the war for his command of the auxiliary cruiser SMS Wolf.

Karl Werner Lothar Koch was a German hacker in the 1980s, who called himself "hagbard", after Hagbard Celine. He was involved in a Cold War computer espionage incident.

Karl Heinz Bohrer was a German literary scholar and essayist. He worked as chief editor for literature of the daily FAZ, and became co-publisher and author of the cultural magazine Merkur. He taught at the Bielefeld University for decades, and also at Stanford University, California. His autobiography appeared in two volumes in 2012 and 2017. Bohrer is regarded as a disputative intellectual thinker and critic, reflecting his time. He received notable awards for criticism, German language and literature, including the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize and the Heinrich Mann Prize.

Karl Ludwig Schulmeister (1770–1853) was an Austrian double agent for France during the reign of Napoleon I.

Karl Laurenz trained as a lawyer, but worked, for much of his life, as a German journalist and specialist translator. He was executed as a western spy on the guillotine in Dresden. Approximately ten minutes later his lover Elli Barczatis was also executed.

Captain Karl Mayr was a German General Staff officer and Adolf Hitler's immediate superior in an army Intelligence Division in the Reichswehr, 1919–1920. Mayr was particularly known as the man who introduced Hitler to politics. In 1919, Mayr directed Hitler to write the Gemlich letter, in which Hitler first expressed his anti-semitic views in writing.

Karl Genrikhovich Vaino is a former Estonian SSR politician. From July 26, 1978 to June 16, 1988 he was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Estonia.

Karl Heinrich Timmermann was the first American officer to cross the Rhine River in Germany during World War II after directing the assault across the bridge, helping remove explosive charges, and surviving the German Army demolition attempt to destroy the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen on March 7, 1945.

Karl Ritter von Frisch, was a German-Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz.