People from the Province of Westphalia

Nikolaus Gross (German: Groß) (30 September 1898 – 23 January 1945) was a German Roman Catholic. Gross first worked in crafts requiring skilled labor before becoming a coal miner like his father while joining a range of trade union and political movements. But he soon settled on becoming a journalist before he got married while World War II prompted him to become a resistance fighter in the time of the Third Reich and for his anti-violent rhetoric and approach to opposing Adolf Hitler. He was also one of those implicated and arrested for the assassination attempt on Hitler despite not being involved himself.His cause for sainthood saw it acknowledged that Gross had died in 1945 "in odium fidei" (in hatred of the faith) which allowed for Pope John Paul II to preside over the beatification for the murdered journalist on 7 October 2001 in Saint Peter's Square.

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s and for his widely quoted 1946 poem "First they came ...". The poem exists in many versions; the one featured on the United States Holocaust Memorial reads: "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me."
Niemöller was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler and a self-identified antisemite. He became one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant churches. He opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph. For his opposition to the Nazis' state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution. After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret about not having done enough to help victims of the Nazis. He turned away from his earlier nationalistic beliefs and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. From the 1950s on, he was a vocal pacifist and anti-war activist, and vice-chair of War Resisters' International from 1966 to 1972. He met with Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War and was a committed campaigner for nuclear disarmament.

Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen, Erbsälzer zu Werl und Neuwerk (German: [ˈfʁants fɔn ˈpaːpn̩] ; 29 October 1879 – 2 May 1969) was a German conservative politician, reactionary, diplomat, Prussian nobleman and General Staff officer. He served as the chancellor of Germany in 1932, and then as the vice-chancellor under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1934.
Born into a wealthy family of Westphalian Catholic aristocrats, Papen served in the Prussian Army from 1898 onward and was trained as a German General Staff officer. He served as military attaché in Mexico and the United States from 1913 to 1915, while also covertly organising acts of sabotage in the United States and quietly backing and financing Mexican forces in the Mexican Revolution on behalf of German military intelligence.
After being expelled as persona non grata by the United States State Department in 1915, he served as a battalion commander on the Western Front of World War I and finished his war service in the Middle Eastern theatre as a lieutenant colonel.
Asked to become chancellor of the Weimar Republic by President Paul von Hindenburg in 1932, Papen ruled by presidential decree. He launched the Preußenschlag coup against the Social Democratic Party-led Government in the Free State of Prussia. His failure to secure a base of support in the Reichstag led to his removal by Hindenburg and replacement by General Kurt von Schleicher.
Determined to return to power, Papen, believing that Adolf Hitler could be controlled once he was in the government, pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor and Papen as vice-chancellor in 1933 in a cabinet ostensibly not under Nazi Party domination. Seeing military dictatorship as the only alternative to a Nazi Party chancellor, Hindenburg consented. Papen and his allies were quickly marginalized by Hitler and he left the government after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, during which the Nazis killed some of his allies and confidants. Subsequently, Papen served the German Foreign Office as the ambassador in Vienna from 1934 to 1938 and in Ankara from 1939 to 1944. He joined the Nazi Party in 1938.After the Second World War, Papen was indicted for Nazi war crimes in the Nuremberg trials before the International Military Tribunal but was acquitted of all charges. In 1947, a West German denazification court found Papen to have acted as the main culprit in crimes relating to the Nazi government. Papen was given a sentence of eight years' imprisonment at hard labour, but was released on appeal in 1949. Franz von Papen's memoirs were published in 1952 and 1953; he died in 1969.

Kurt Gerstein (11 August 1905 – 25 July 1945) was a German SS officer and head of technical disinfection services of the Hygiene-Institut der Waffen-SS (Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS). After witnessing mass murders in the Belzec and Treblinka Nazi extermination camps, Gerstein gave a detailed report to Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, as well as to Swiss diplomats, members of the Roman Catholic Church with contacts to Pope Pius XII, and to the Dutch government-in-exile, in an effort to inform the international community about the Holocaust as it was happening. In 1945, following his surrender, he wrote the Gerstein Report covering his experience of the Holocaust. He died of an alleged suicide while in French custody.

Karl-Günther Heimsoth, also known as Karl-Guenter Heimsoth (4 December 1899, Charlottenburg – July 1934, Berlin), was a German physician, polygraph, and politician. Heimsoth was a member of the Nazi Party and later the Communist Party of Germany.

Max Robitzsch (2 February 1887 – 10 June 1952) was a German meteorological scientist and university professor. He invented the "Robitzsch Actinograph", a type of pyranometer and wrote numerous scientific books and articles.
He was born in Höxter, Province of Westphalia. He also undertook an expedition into the Scandinavian arctic to research atmospheric phenomena, spending the 1912/1913 winter in Spitsbergen, Norway. His mission, together with Kurt Wegener, brother of Alfred Wegener, was to set up a meteorological observatory for the German Geophysical Observatory, which they did at the Crossbai, Ebeltofthafen (Ebeltofthamna in Norwegian). During the long winter stay, they and two helpers performed 275 pilot balloon soundings, 98 tethered balloon soundings and 19 probe launches with the help of a hang glider. As of 2000, only some archeological remains of the obersvatory could be found.For much of his life (since at least 1917), he worked as a professor at the Meteorological Observatory Lindenberg (German Wikipedia) in Lindenberg, Brandenburg. During the Cold War, he there undertook numerous extensive radio sounding studies of the atmosphere with weather balloons, reputedly at the behalf of the Soviet occupation forces in East Germany.During January to May 1950, he was director of the Meteorologisches Observatorium Lindenberg, before later on becoming professor at (and possibly the director of) the Geophysical Institute of Leipzig, later subsumed in the University of Leipzig.

Eduard Raehlmann (19 March 1848, Ibbenbüren – 1 September 1917, Weimar) was a German ophthalmologist.
He studied medicine at the Universities of Würzburg and Halle, obtaining his doctorate at the latter institution in 1872. In 1875, he received his habilitation at the University of Strassburg, and in 1879 succeeded Georg von Oettingen as professor of ophthalmology at the University of Dorpat. After 1900, he worked as a private scholar in Weimar.His primary work dealt with anatomical and pathological investigations of the cornea, as well as studies involving amyloid degeneration of conjunctiva and research of retinal detachment. In the Baltic states, he was at the forefront in the fight against trachoma. At Weimar, he conducted research of color perception and color photography.

Hermann Schomberg (22 August 1907 – 16 November 1975) was a German film and television actor.

Bernhard Hoetger (4 May 1874 in Dortmund – 18 July 1949 in Interlaken) was a German sculptor, painter and handicrafts artist of the Expressionist movement.

Sir Charles Hallé (born Karl Halle; 11 April 1819 – 25 October 1895) was an Anglo-German pianist and conductor, and founder of The Hallé orchestra in 1858.