Members of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin

François Louis Ganshof (14 March 1895, Bruges – 26 July 1980, Brussels) was a Belgian medievalist. After studies at the Athénée Royal, he attended the University of Ghent, where he came under the influence of Henri Pirenne. After studies with Ferdinand Lot, he practiced law for a period, before returning to the University of Ghent. Here he succeeded Pirenne in 1930 as professor of medieval history, after Pirenne left the university as a result of the enforcement of Dutch as language of instruction. He remained there until his retirement in 1961.
Ganshof's work was primarily on Flanders in the Carolingian period. His best known book is Qu'est-ce que la féodalité? (1944). Here he defines feudalism narrowly, in simple legal and military terms. Feudalism, in Ganshof's view, existed only within the nobility. This contrasts with Marc Bloch, where feudalism encompasses society as a whole, and Susan Reynolds, who questions the concept of feudalism in itself.
Though Ganshof's definition is not always accepted today, this book was not his only work. He contributed greatly to his field, mostly through articles. Among the few books he published were Les Destinées de l'Empire en occident de 395 à 888 (1928) and Flandre sous les premiers comtes (1943). In 1946 he received the Francqui Prize for Human Sciences.
Ganshof was renowned as the greatest European expert on the Frankish kingdoms, particularly under the Carolingian dynasty; he never wrote the definitive biography of Charlemagne that everyone expected of him, but his contributions to Frankish history continue to be fundamental. The best English-language introduction to this (very major) aspect of his work is in F.L. Ganshof, The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy. Studies in Carolingian History, tr. Janet Sondheimer (London: Longman, 1971). This collection of major articles ends with an exhaustive bibliography of Ganshof's writings on Merovingian and Carolingian history down to 1970.

Louis Robert (15 February 1904 in Laurière – 31 May 1985 in Paris) was a professor of Greek history and Epigraphy at the Collège de France, and author of many volumes and articles on Greek epigraphy (from the archaic period to Late Antiquity), numismatics, and historical geography. He was an international authority on the history, geography, toponymy and archaeology of ancient Asia Minor.

Walter Robert Wilhelm Grotrian (21 April 1890 in Aachen; † 3 March 1954 in Potsdam) was a German astronomer and astrophysicist.
Grotrian studied the emission line from the solar corona in the green region of the spectrum; this emission line could not be attributed to any known chemical element and was thought to be a new element (which scientists named "coronium"). Grotrian and Bengt Edlén from Sweden demonstrated that the two observed emission lines arise from iron atoms that have lost about half their 26 electrons.

Rudolf Seeliger (12 November 1886 – 20 January 1965) was a German physicist who specialized in electric discharges in gases and plasma physics.
From 1906 to 1909, Seeliger studied at the University of Tübingen and the University of Heidelberg. He then became a student of Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, where he got his doctorate in 1910. The topic of his thesis, the physics of electrical currents in gas, set the theme for his life’s field of research. He then went to conduct postgraduate research, on the same topic, at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in Berlin. In 1915, he was also a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin. In 1918, he was called by Johannes Stark, Director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Greifswald, to be extraordinarius professor there. In 1921, Seeliger took the position of ordinarius professor for theoretical physics at the University. He became Director of the Institute of Physics in 1940, and was succeeded in 1955, by Walter Schallreuter, who had been a co-author with Seeliger on a physics textbook series.In collaboration with Ernst Gehrcke at the PTR, Seeliger continued his research on electrical discharges in gases. In the spring of 1912, Gehrcke and Seeliger determined that light from cathode rays (electron beams) passing through gases, such as nitrogen and mercury vapor, became longer in wavelength, as the velocity of the cathode rays were slowed, i.e., becoming lower in energy. These results, through experiments in 1912 and 1913, were clarified and interpreted, by James Franck and Gustav Hertz, nephew of Heinrich Hertz; for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom, Franck and Hertz were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925.In 1946, Paul Schulz founded the Forschungsstelle für Gasentladungsphysik (Research Center for Gas Discharge Physics) under the Academy of Sciences. When Schulz left in 1949, Seeliger became director. In 1950, the center was renamed the Institut für Gasentladungsphysik (Institute for Gas Discharge Physics). In 1969, the institute was reassigned to the Zentralinstitut für Elektronenphysik (Central Institute of Electron Physics). On 31 December 1991 the Institut für Gasentladungsphysik was dissolved and reopened the next day as the Institut für Niedertemperatur-Plasmaphysik e.V. and became part of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community.From 1946 to 1948, Seeliger was Rector of the University of Greifswald.

Eduard Spranger (27 June 1882 – 17 September 1963) was a German philosopher and psychologist. A student of Wilhelm Dilthey, Spranger was born in Berlin and died in Tübingen. He was considered a humanist who developed a philosophical pedagogy as an act of 'self defense' against the psychology-oriented experimental theory of the times.Spranger was the author of the book Lebensformen (Translated as Types of Men), which sold 28,000 copies by the end of 1920. Spranger theorizes that types of human life are structures in consciousness. His belief was that personality types have a basis in biology, but can not be fully explained by biology. He wrote, "On a lower level, perhaps, the soul is purely biologically determined. On a higher level, the historical, for instance, the soul participates in objective values which cannot be deduced from the simple value of self-preservation." He criticized psychologists who reduced the psyche and society to abstract elements of science. Another characteristic of Spranger's thought is his interest in holism, which involves the discovery that "everything is part of everything else," and that the "totality of mind is present in every act." He asserts that quantitative calculations of sensations, reflexes, and citations from memory are meaningless units, that when synthesized, do not add up to the meaningful whole that we all live.

Friedrich Hermann Hund (4 February 1896 – 31 March 1997) was a German physicist from Karlsruhe known for his work on atoms and molecules.

Werner Wilhelm Jaeger (30 July 1888 – 19 October 1961) was a German-American classicist.

Georges Lefebvre (French: [ʒɔʁʒ ləfɛvʁ]; 6 August 1874 – 28 August 1959) was a French historian, best known for his work on the French Revolution and peasant life. He is considered one of the pioneers of "history from below". He coined the phrase the "death certificate of the old order" to describe the Great Fear of 1789. Among his most significant works was the 1924 book Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française ("The Peasants of the North During the French Revolution"), which was the result of 20 years of research into the role of the peasantry during the revolutionary period.