Famous Kieffers: soldiers, scholars and scientists

This is a selection, not a ranking. Every person below is documented in the sources listed at the end of the page. Dates and details come from those sources.

Philippe Kieffer (1899–1962), commander of the D-Day commandos

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on 24 October 1899, to an Alsatian father who taught mathematics, Philippe Kieffer was working in banking when the Second World War began. He joined the Free French Naval Forces on 1 July 1940 and went on to lead the French naval commandos, the “green berets”.

On 6 June 1944, his 177 commandos landed on Sword Beach and secured a foothold in Ouistreham, then pushed on to Bénouville, Amfreville and Bavent. Wounded on the first day, Kieffer refused to be evacuated for two days. His son Claude, a member of the Resistance, was killed by German troops that August.

Kieffer was made a Companion of the Liberation. He advised on the film The Longest Day in 1961, died on 20 November 1962 at Cormeilles-en-Parisis, and is buried at Grandcamp-Maisy in Normandy. A unit of the French naval commandos still bears his name: the Commando Kieffer.

Jean-Daniel Kieffer (1767–1833), orientalist

Born in Strasbourg, Jean-Daniel Kieffer served as an interpreter for the French foreign ministry. He was posted to the embassy in Constantinople and imprisoned there in the Yedikule fortress after 1798. He later became interpreter to King Louis XVIII. In 1822 he took the chair of Turkish at the Collège de France. He revised a Turkish translation of the New Testament and began a Turkish–French dictionary that was completed after his death. He died of cholera in Paris in 1833.

Jean-Jacques Kieffer (1857–1925), the insect specialist of Bitche

Born at Guinkirchen in Moselle, Jean-Jacques Kieffer taught natural sciences in Bitche. In his spare hours he became an authority on small insects: parasitic wasps, gall midges and mosquitoes. The University of Strasbourg awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1904. Several genera of insects are named after him, including Kiefferia and Kiefferulus, and a secondary school in Bitche bears his name.

Peter Kieffer and the Kieffer pear

Peter Kieffer was a nurseryman at Roxborough, near Philadelphia, who grew the Chinese sand pear as an ornamental tree, with Bartlett pears in the same garden. Among his chance seedlings he noticed one with an unusual habit and kept it. The tree first bore fruit in 1863. It was named “Kieffer” at the 1876 Centennial Exposition and entered the American Pomological Society’s fruit list in 1883. By 1921, the pomologist U. P. Hedrick could describe it as the pear grown more widely than any other in North America, valued above all for cooking and canning.

Aldine Silliman Kieffer (1840–1904), singing teacher and publisher

Born in Missouri, Aldine Kieffer was the grandson of the Mennonite musician Joseph Funk. He became a leading champion of shape-note music, a notation that helped ordinary people learn to sing by sight. With Ephraim Ruebush he ran a music publishing house that moved to Dayton, Virginia, in 1878. He edited The Musical Million, a periodical that ran from 1870 to 1914, and taught singing schools across the region.

Susan Kieffer (born 1942), planetary geologist

Susan Werner Kieffer, born in Warren, Pennsylvania, studies how fluids behave in volcanoes, geysers and rivers. Her work covers the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, Old Faithful in Yellowstone, and the volcanic plumes of Jupiter’s moon Io. She was a MacArthur Fellow from 1995 to 2000, received the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America in 2014, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

More Kieffers

Eduardo Gudiño Kieffer (1935–2002), Argentine writer.
Johann Jakob Kieffer (1814–1891), German history painter of the Düsseldorf school.
Monique Kieffer (born 1952), Luxembourgish historian.
Maximilian Kieffer (born 1990), German professional golfer.
Jean-Luc Kieffer (born 1969), French handball player and coach.

The name has also reached the map and the sky: Kieffer Knoll is a hill in Antarctica, and asteroid (3779) Kieffer is named after Hugh H. Kieffer.