- 1553 – Death of artist Lucas Cranach the Elder
- 1750 – Death of composer Sylvius Leopold Weiss
- 1906 – The Captain of Köpenick Wilhelm Voigt masquerades as an officer, which makes him famous
- 1927 – Birth of writer Günter Grass, recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature
- 1946 – Several major Nazi war criminals are executed following the judgment in the Nuremberg Trials