List of Famous people who died in 1971

Usmar Ismail was a prominent Indonesian film director of Minangkabau descent. He was widely regarded as the native Indonesian pioneer of the Cinema of Indonesia although films made by the Dutch date back to around 1926.

Heinz Lammerding was a German SS functionary and war criminal during the Nazi era. During World War II, he commanded the SS Panzer Division Das Reich that perpetrated the Tulle and the Oradour-sur-Glane massacres in occupied France. After the war, Lammerding was convicted in absentia for having ordered the murder of approximately 750 French civilians, but remained protected by Germany after serving a prison sentence there.

Diane Arbus was an American photographer. Arbus worked to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people. She worked with a wide range of subjects including; strippers, carnival performers, nudists, dwarves, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity." In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered," Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, that her work "transformed the art of photography ".

Hikmet Ali Kıvılcımlı was a Turkish communist leader, theoretician, writer, publicist, and translator. He was a founder of the Vatan Partisi (VP).

Josina Abiathar Muthemba Machel was a leader of FRELIMO and a significant figure in the struggle for independence in Mozambique.

Franz Paul Stangl was an Austrian-born police officer and commandant of the Nazi extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka. Stangl, an employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program and an SS commander in Nazi Germany, became commandant of the camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. He worked for Volkswagen do Brasil and was arrested in Brazil in 1967, extradited to West Germany and tried for the mass murder of 1 million people. In 1970, he was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment. He died of heart failure six months later.

Izolda Vasilyevna Izvitskaya was a Soviet actress.

Roger Léon Charles Guérillot was a French colonist of Ubangi-Shari who was involved in the process of independence by which it became the Central African Republic. He subsequently became the first president of the new country and served the Central African Republic in several diplomatic roles.

Hans Schmidt was a German international footballer and manager.

Reinhold Maier was a German politician and the leader of the FDP from 1957–1960. From 1946 to 1952 he was Minister President of Württemberg-Baden and then the 1st Minister President of the new state of Baden-Württemberg until 1953.