List of Famous people who died in 1946

Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav Keitel was a German field marshal and war criminal during the Nazi era who served as Chief of the Armed Forces High Command – the office given to the commander and highest-ranking officer of the Nazi Germany Armed Forces during World War II. In this capacity, Keitel signed a number of criminal orders and directives that led to a war of unprecedented brutality and criminality.

Amon Leopold Göth was an Austrian SS functionary and war criminal. He served as the commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp in Płaszów in German-occupied Poland for most of the camp's existence during World War II.

William Claude Dukenfield, better known as W. C. Fields, was an American comedian, actor, juggler, and writer. Fields' comic persona was a misanthropic and hard-drinking egotist, who remained a sympathetic character despite his supposed contempt for children and dogs.

Willi Herold, also known as "the Executioner of Emsland," was a German war criminal. Near the end of World War II in Europe, Herold deserted from the German Army and, posing as a Luftwaffe captain, organized the mass execution of deserters held at a German prison camp. Herold was arrested by British forces and executed for war crimes on 14 November 1946 at Wolfenbüttel prison.

Rondo Hatton was an American journalist and occasional film actor with a minor career playing thuggish bit and extra parts in Hollywood B movies, culminating in his elevation to horror movie star-status with Universal Studios in the last two years of his life, and posthumously as a movie cult icon. He was known for his unique facial features, which were the result of acromegaly, a syndrome caused by a disorder of the pituitary gland.

Masaharu Homma was a lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Homma commanded the Japanese 14th Army, which invaded the Philippines and perpetrated the Bataan Death March. After the war, Homma was convicted of war crimes relating to the actions of troops under his direct command and executed by firing squad on April 3, 1946.

Tengku Amir Hamzah was an Indonesian poet and National Hero of Indonesia. Born into a Malay aristocratic family in the Sultanate of Langkat in North Sumatra, he was educated in both Sumatra and Java. While attending senior high school in Surakarta around 1930, the youth became involved with the nationalist movement and fell in love with a Javanese schoolmate, Ilik Sundari. Even after Amir continued his studies in legal school in Batavia the two remained close, only separating in 1937 when Amir was recalled to Sumatra to marry the sultan's daughter and take on responsibilities of the court. Though unhappy with his marriage, he fulfilled his courtly duties. After Indonesia proclaimed its independence in 1945, he served as the government's representative in Langkat. The following year he was killed in a socialist revolution led by the Communist Party of Indonesia and buried in a mass grave.

Wanrong, of the Gobulo clan of the Manchu Plain White Banner Gobulo clan, was the wife and empress consort of Puyi, the last Emperor of China, sometimes anachronistically called the “Xuantong Empress”, referring to Puyi’s era name. She was titular empress consort of the Qing dynasty from 1922 until her death, and later became the empress consort of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo from 1934 until abolition of the monarchy in 1945. She was posthumously honored with the title Empress Xiaokemin.

Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Bachelier was a French mathematician at the turn of the 20th century. He is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now called Brownian motion, as part of his PhD thesis The Theory of Speculation.

Miroslav Filipović, also known as Tomislav Filipović and Tomislav Filipović-Majstorović, was a Bosnian Croat Franciscan friar and Ustashe military chaplain who participated in atrocities during World War II in Yugoslavia. Convicted as a war criminal in a Yugoslav civil court, he was executed by hanging in 1946.