List of Famous people named Rudolf

Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy; other influences include Goethean science and Rosicrucianism.

Rudolf Walter Richard Hess was a German politician and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, Hess served in that position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom during World War II. He was taken prisoner and eventually convicted of crimes against peace, serving a life sentence until his suicide in 1987.

Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, real name William August Fisher, was a Soviet intelligence officer. He adopted his alias when arrested on charges of conspiracy by the FBI in 1957.

Rudolf Stefan Jan Weigl was a Polish biologist, physician, and inventor. He is most known for creating the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus. He founded the Weigl Institute in Lwów, where he conducted vaccine research.

Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev was a Soviet-born ballet dancer and choreographer. Nureyev is regarded by some as the greatest male ballet dancer of his generation.

Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow was a German physician, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist, writer, editor, and politician. He is known as "the father of modern pathology" and as the founder of social medicine, and to his colleagues, the "Pope of medicine". He received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1892. He was a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, but he declined to be ennobled as "von Virchow".

Rudolf "Rudi" Dassler was the German founder of the sportswear company Puma and the older brother of Adidas founder, Adolf "Adi" Dassler. The brothers were partners in a shoe company Adi started, "Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik". Rudi joined in 1924. However, after a feud developed between Rudolf and Adolf Dassler following World War II, the brothers went separate ways and started their own companies in 1948.

Rudolf Diels was a German civil servant and head of the Gestapo in 1933–34. He obtained the rank of SS-Oberführer and was a protégé of Hermann Göring.

Rudolf Hermann Brandt was a German SS officer from 1933–45 and a civil servant. A lawyer by profession, Brandt was the Personal Administrative Officer to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and a defendant at the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg for his part in securing the 86 victims of the Jewish skeleton collection, an attempt to create an anthropological display of plaster body casts and skeletal remains of Jews. He was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and executed in 1948.

Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was a German SS officer during the Nazi era who, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, was convicted for war crimes. Höss was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. He tested and implemented means to accelerate Hitler's order to systematically exterminate the Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe, known as the Final Solution. On the initiative of one of his subordinates, Karl Fritzsch, Höss introduced the pesticide Zyklon B to be used in gas chambers, where more than a million people were killed.