Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (German for Universal German Biography) is one of the most important and most comprehensive biographical reference works in the German language.

It was published by the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences between 1875 and 1912 in 56 volumes, printed in Leipzig by Duncker & Humblot. The ADB contains biographies of about 26,500 people who died before 1900 and lived in the German language Sprachraum of their time, including people from the Netherlands before 1648.

Its successor, the Neue Deutsche Biographie, was started in 1953 and is planned to be ready in 2017.

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