Wilhelm Heckmann (26 June 1897 – 10 March 1995) was a German concert and easy listening musician. From 1937 to 1945, he was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps in Dachau and Mauthausen. Heckmann founded the first prisoner band in Mauthausen, and was also instrumental in the founding of the large prisoner orchestra there.
Michel Jacques Saint-Denis (13 September 1897 – 31 July 1971), dit Jacques Duchesne, was a French actor, theatre director, and drama theorist whose ideas on actor training have had a profound influence on the development of European theatre from the 1930s on.
Marie-Alain Couturier, O.P., (15 November 1897 – 9 February 1954) was a French Dominican friar and Catholic priest, who gained fame as a designer of stained glass windows. He was noted for his modern inspiration in the field of Sacred art.
Norbert Casteret (19 August 1897 – 20 July 1987) was a famous French caver, adventurer and writer, and is one of the most recognisable names in caving worldwide. Following Édouard-Alfred Martel (the "father of modern speleology", although Casteret sometimes also enjoys this title), Casteret, along with Robert de Joly, became a leading figure of French speleology between the world wars and into the middle of the 20th century.
Marcel Herrand (8 October 1897 – 11 June 1953) was a French stage and film actor best remembered for his roles in swashbuckling or historical films.
He appeared in over 25 films between 1932 and 1952, but Herrand's best remembered role is as Lacenaire (based on Pierre François Lacenaire) in Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis, 1945). Other films in which Herrand appeared include The Last Days of Pompeii (1950) and Fanfan la Tulipe (1952), which also featured Gérard Philipe and Gina Lollobrigida, in which Herrand played the role of Louis XV of France.
Georges-Henri Rivière (1897–1985) was a French museologist, and innovator of modern French ethnographic museology practices.
Piet Oege Bakker (10 August 1897 – 1 April 1960) was a Dutch journalist and writer. He was joint editor for many years of the weekly magazine Elseviers Weekblad.
His most famous work was the trilogy written between 1941 and 1946 dealing with the experiences of the street urchin Ciske Vrijmoeth, alias Ciske the Rat. These novels sold in their hundreds of thousands, and later appeared in translation in more than ten other countries. The story has been filmed twice, in 1955 and 1984, and a musical version ran from October 2007 to November 2009.
Karl Küpfmüller (6 October 1897 – 26 December 1977) was a German electrical engineer, who was prolific in the areas of communications technology, measurement and control engineering, acoustics, communication theory, and theoretical electro-technology.
Peter Bamm (a pen name; his real name was Curt Emmrich; 20 October 1897 in Hochneukirch, now part of Jüchen, Germany – 30 March 1975 in Zollikon, Switzerland) was a German writer.
Peter Bamm volunteered for military service in World War I, after which he studied medicine and sinology in Munich, Göttingen and Freiburg im Breisgau. As a ship's doctor he travelled the world a great deal before eventually settling in Berlin-Wedding.
During World War II he served as a military doctor on the Russian Front, and later described his experiences in the book "Die Unsichtbare Flagge" (The Invisible Flag). After the war he travelled for study purposes between 1952 and 1957 in the Near and Middle East, after which he wrote as a journalist and feature writer for a number of Berlin newspapers.
He is buried in the Stöcken Cemetery in Hanover.
Lazare Ponticelli (born Lazzaro Ponticelli; 24 December 1897, later mistranscribed as 7 December – 12 March 2008), Knight of Vittorio Veneto, was at 110, the last surviving officially recognized veteran of the First World War from France and the last poilu of its trenches to die.Born in Italy, he travelled on his own to France at the age of eight. Aged 16, he lied about his age in order to join the French Army at the start of the war in 1914, before being transferred against his will to the Italian Army the following year. After the war, he came back to Paris where he and his brothers founded the piping and metal work company Ponticelli Frères (Ponticelli Brothers), which produced supplies for the Second World War effort and as of 2023 is still in business. He also worked with the French Resistance against the Nazis.
Ponticelli was the oldest living man of Italian birth and the oldest man living in France at the time of his death. Every Armistice Day until 2007 he attended ceremonies honoring deceased veterans. In his later years, he criticized war, and stored his awards from the First World War in a shoe box. While he felt unworthy of the state funeral the French government offered him, he eventually accepted one. However, he asked that the procession emphasise the common soldiers who died on the battlefield. French president Nicolas Sarkozy honored his wish and dedicated a plaque to them at the procession.