List of Famous people who died in 1943

Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili was the eldest of Joseph Stalin's three children, the son of Stalin's first wife, Kato Svanidze, who died 9 months after his birth. His father, then a young revolutionary in his mid-20s, left the child to be raised by his late wife's family. In 1921, when Dzhugashvili had reached the age of fourteen, he was brought to Moscow, where his father had become a leading figure in the Bolshevik government who eventually became head of the Soviet Union. Disregarded by Stalin, Dzhugashvili was a shy, quiet child who appeared quite unhappy and tried to commit suicide several times as a youth. Married twice, Dzhugashvili had three children, two of whom reached adulthood.

Franciszka Manheimer-Rosenberg, better known as Franceska Mann, was a Polish Jewish ballerina who according to some accounts had killed a Nazi guard while a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp, Josef Schillinger, and wounded at least one other, Wilhelm Emmerich, initiating an uprising among female Jewish prisoners before she was killed, presumably by gunfire. In the most popular version of the event, but never verified, Mann is said to have performed a striptease for members of the Nazi regime and once down to naught but high heels, took one of her shoes and stabbed Walter Quakernack in the face with the heel-piece, causing him to drop his firearm, which she then used to shoot Schillinger and Emmerich. Schillinger ultimately died from his wounds several hours later while Emmerich was left with a permanent limp. According to another account, however, she was a Nazi collaborator who was executed by the Polish underground in the Fall of 1942.

Helen Beatrix Potter was an English writer, illustrator, natural scientist and conservationist; she was best known for her children's books featuring animals, such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

Doris "Dorie" Miller was an American and United States Navy Cook Third Class who was killed in action during World War II. For attending to the wounded and manning an anti-aircraft machine gun, for which he had no training, while serving aboard a battleship during the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he was awarded the Navy Cross.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a prominent Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist best known for having identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants. He devoted his life to the study and improvement of wheat, maize and other cereal crops that sustain the global population. Vavilov's work was criticized by Trofim Lysenko, whose anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with Joseph Stalin. As a result, Vavilov was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death in July 1941. Although his sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, he died in prison in 1943. In 1955 his death sentence was retroactively pardoned under Nikita Khrushchev. By the 1960s his reputation was publicly rehabilitated and he began to be hailed as a hero of Soviet science.

Leslie Howard Steiner was an English actor and film maker. He also wrote many stories and articles for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair and was one of the biggest box-office draws and movie idols of the 1930s.

Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller was an American jazz pianist, organist, composer, violinist, singer, and comedic entertainer. His innovations in the Harlem stride style laid the groundwork for modern jazz piano. His best-known compositions, "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose", were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1984 and 1999. Waller copyrighted over 400 songs, many of them co-written with his closest collaborator, Andy Razaf. Razaf described his partner as "the soul of melody... a man who made the piano sing... both big in body and in mind... known for his generosity... a bubbling bundle of joy". It is possible financial circumstances caused him to compose many more popular songs and sell them to other performers.

Willem Arondeus was a Dutch artist and author who joined the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance movement during World War II. He participated in the bombing of the Amsterdam public records office to hinder the Nazi German effort to identify Dutch Jews and others wanted by the Gestapo. Arondeus was caught and executed soon after his arrest. Yad Vashem recognized Arondeus as Righteous Among the Nations.

Rut "Rutka" Laskier was a Jewish Polish diarist who is best known for her 1943 diary chronicling the three months of her life during the Holocaust in Poland. She was murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943 at the age of fourteen. Her manuscript, authenticated by Holocaust scholars and survivors, was published in the Polish language for the first time ever in early 2006. It has been compared to the diary of Anne Frank.

Charlotte Salomon was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin. She is primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. In October 1943 she was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she and her unborn child were gassed to death by the Nazis soon after her arrival. In 2015, a stunning nineteen-page confession by Salomon to the fatal poisoning of her grandfather, kept secret for decades, was released by a Parisian publisher.