List of Famous people who died in 1940

Prince Friedrich Heinrich Albrecht, Prince of Prussia was a Prussian officer, member of the house of Hohenzollern, and a great-grandson of Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. He was persecuted for being homosexual.

Werner Bohne (1895-1940) was a German cinematographer of the Weimar and Nazi eras. He was killed in 1940, while working on a propaganda documentary during a battle as part of the invasion of Norway.

Dom Pedro de Alcântara of Orléans-Braganza, Prince of Grão Pará was the first-born son of Dona Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil and Prince Gaston of Orléans, Count of Eu, and as such, was born second-in-line to the imperial throne of Brazil, during the reign of his grandfather, Emperor Dom Pedro II, until the empire's abolition. He went into exile in Europe with his mother when his grandfather was deposed in 1889, and grew up largely in France, at a family apartment in Boulogne-sur-Seine, and at his father's castle, the Château d'Eu in Normandy.

Mary Katherine Horony-Cummings, also known as Big Nose Kate, was a Hungarian-born American prostitute, and longtime companion and common-law wife of Old West gunfighter Doc Holliday.

Alexandre Mikhailovich Besredka was a French biologist and immunologist born in Odessa. In 1910 he became a citizen of France.

Louis Louis-Dreyfus was a member of the French parliament and co-director of the commodity distribution and trading company, Louis Dreyfus Group.

Nicolae Iorga was a Romanian historian, politician, literary critic, memoirist, poet and playwright. Co-founder of the Democratic Nationalist Party (PND), he served as a member of Parliament, President of the Deputies' Assembly and Senate, cabinet minister and briefly (1931–32) as Prime Minister. A child prodigy, polymath and polyglot, Iorga produced an unusually large body of scholarly works, establishing his international reputation as a medievalist, Byzantinist, Latinist, Slavist, art historian and philosopher of history. Holding teaching positions at the University of Bucharest, the University of Paris and several other academic institutions, Iorga was founder of the International Congress of Byzantine Studies and the Institute of South-East European Studies (ISSEE). His activity also included the transformation of Vălenii de Munte town into a cultural and academic center.

Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois was a Dutch paleoanthropologist and geologist. He earned worldwide fame for his discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus, or "Java Man". Although hominid fossils had been found and studied before, Dubois was the first anthropologist to embark upon a purposeful search for them.