List of Famous people who died in 1939

Roswell Keyes Colcord was an American politician. He served as the seventh Governor of Nevada from 1891 to 1895. He was a member of the Republican Party.

Xu Shichang was the President of the Republic of China, in Beijing, from 10 October 1918 to 2 June 1922. The only permanent president of the Beiyang government to be a civilian, his presidency was also the longest of the warlord era.

Karl Friedrich von Auwers was a German chemist, and was the academic adviser of both Karl Ziegler and Georg Wittig at the University of Marburg.

Philipp Heinrich Scheidemann was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). On 9 November 1918, in the midst of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, he proclaimed Germany a republic. Later, beginning in the early part of the following year, he became the second head of government of the Weimar Republic, acting in this post for 127 days.

Alfred Wotquenne was a Belgian musical bibliographer, best known for his catalogues of the works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Christoph Willibald Gluck.

Olaf Amundsen was a Norwegian lawyer and politician for the Liberal Party.

Charles Du Bos was a French essayist and critic, known for works including Approximations (1922–37), a seven-volume collection of essays and letters, and for his Journal, an autobiographical work published posthumously from 1946 to 1961. His other work included Byron et le besoin de la fatalité (1929), a study of Lord Byron, and Dialogue avec André Gide, an essay on his friend André Gide. Influenced by thinkers including Henri Bergson, Georg Simmel and Friedrich Nietzsche, Du Bos was well-known as a literary critic in France in the 1920s and 1930s. He maintained a distance from the political developments of those decades, while nonetheless seeking in his writing to reframe political phenomena as ethical problems. Alongside Gide and the American novelist Edith Wharton, he was involved in providing aid to Belgian refugees in Paris following the 1914 German invasion of Belgium. Raised Catholic, Du Bos lost his faith as a young man, then regained it in 1927, and regarded this conversion as the central event of his life.

Prince Joachim of Prussia was a member of the House of Hohenzollern. He was the second eldest son of Prince Albert of Prussia and his wife Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg. He is notable for composing music, in particular military waltzes.

Mao Fumei was the first wife of Chiang Kai-shek, and the biological mother of Chiang Ching-Kuo.