List of Famous people who died in 1940

Flora Finch was an English-born vaudevillian, stage and film actress who starred in over 300 silent films, including over 200 for the Vitagraph Studios film company.

Guy Lambton Menzies was an Australian aviator who flew the first solo trans-Tasman flight, from Sydney, Australia to the West Coast of New Zealand, on 7 January 1931.

Wilhelm "Willi" Münzenberg was a German Communist political activist and publisher. Münzenberg was the first head of the Young Communist International in 1919–20 and established the famine-relief and propaganda organization Workers International Relief in 1921. He was a leading propagandist for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the Weimar Era, but later grew disenchanted with the USSR due to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s. Condemned by Stalin to be purged and arrested for treason, Münzenberg left the KPD and in Paris became a leader of the German émigré anti-fascism and anti-Stalinist community until forced to flee the Nazi advance into France in 1940. Arrested and imprisoned by the Daladier government in France, he escaped prison camp only to be found dead a few months later in a forest near the commune of Saint-Marcellin, France.

Wolfgang Doeblin, known in France as Vincent Doblin, was a French-German mathematician.

James Alfonso Wetmore was an American lawyer and administrator, best known as the Acting Supervising Architect of the U.S. Office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department from 1915 through 1933.