1940 deaths

Louis Edward Webb (September 6, 1911 – September 2, 1940) was an American racecar driver. Predominantly racing midgets and big cars, he was killed in a AAA-sanctioned national championship race.

Werner Scholem (29 December 1895 – 17 July 1940) was a member of the German Reichstag in 1924 to 1928 and a leading member of the Communist Party of Germany. Scholem and his wife, Emmy, were portrayed in the 2014 documentary "Between Utopia and Counter Revolution".

Joseph Meister (21 February 1876 – 24 June 1940) was the first person to be inoculated against rabies by Louis Pasteur, and likely the first person to be successfully treated for the infection, which has a >99% fatality rate once symptoms set in.

Wolff von Stutterheim (17 February 1893 – 3 December 1940) was a German Generalmajor.
Stutterheim was born in Königsberg, Germany. He came from an old military family which produced several generals and seven knights of the order Pour le Mérite. Eleven members of his family fell in action during World War I, including his father and two of his uncles. He was awarded the Pour le Mérite during World War I and the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross during World War II.
Von Stutterheim was severely wounded in aerial combat over France while commanding Kampfgeschwader 77 on 15 June 1940. He died from his wounds in a Berlin hospital on 3 December 1940.

António Ginestal Machado (3 May 1873 – 28 June 1940; Portuguese pronunciation: [ɐ̃ˈtɔniu ʒinɨʃˈtal mɐˈʃaðu]) was a Portuguese politician. He was born in Almeida, graduated in Law at the University of Coimbra and became a high-school teacher. A member of the moderate Republican Union, he was one of the promoters of its fusion with the Evolutionist Party which originated the Republican Liberal Party. He was President of the Ministry (Prime Minister), from 15 November to 14 December 1923, in a minority government. He resigned due to the opposition of President Manuel Teixeira Gomes of dissolving the parliament, after an insurrection attempt. He died in Santarém.

Ernst Heilmann (13 April 1881 – 3 April 1940) was a German jurist and politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Born in Berlin, then in Prussia, Heilmann attended the University of Berlin and majored in law and political science.
During the First World War, Heilmann was a proponent of the German party truce (Burgfriedenspolitik). He gained a seat in the Reichstag in the 1928 German federal election. Not long after Hitler and the Nazis seized power (Machtergreifung), Heilmann was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the first of a series of concentration camps in which he was to spend nearly seven years.From February 1937, Heilmann was kept in Dachau concentration camp until he was transferred in September 1938 to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was executed in April 1940.

Ernst Pfuhl (17 November 1876, Charlottenburg – 7 August 1940, Basel) was a German-Swiss classical archaeologist and art historian. He was the son of sculptor Johannes Pfuhl (1846–1914) and a son-in-law to art dealer Athanasios Rhousopoulos (1823–1898).

Gus Meins (March 6, 1893 – August 1, 1940), born Gustave Peter Ludwig Luley, was an American film director. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany.

Hugo Merton (18 November 1879 in Frankfurt am Main – 23 March 1940 in Edinburgh) was a German zoologist.
He studied sciences at the University of Heidelberg. From October 1907 to August 1908, with herpetologist Jean Roux, he conducted scientific investigations in the Aru and Kei Islands. In 1913 he obtained his habilitation at Heidelberg with a dissertation on the flatworm genus Temnocephala. Because of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws imposed by the Nazis, he was forced to relinquish his position as deputy director at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt as well as his professorship at the University of Heidelberg.In 1937, by way of an invitation from Professor F. A. E. Crew, he went to the University of Edinburgh, where he spent time working in the institute of animal genetics. Upon this return to Germany in 1938, he was arrested and imprisoned in the concentration camp at Dachau. During the following year, he was deported to Scotland, where he resumed his work at the university. Due to deteriorated health, he died soon afterwards in March 1940.Organisms with the specific epithet of mertoni are named in his honor, an example being the sea snake species Parahydrophis mertoni. In 1911, Max Carl Wilhelm Weber named the fish species Pseudomugil gertrudae after Merton's wife, Gertrude.

Rudolf Olden (January 14, 1885 in Stettin – September 18, 1940) was a German lawyer and journalist. In the Weimar period he was a well-known voice in the political debate, a vocal opponent of the Nazis, a fierce advocate of human rights and one of the first to alert the world to the treatment of Jews by the Nazis in 1934. He is the author of Hitler der Eroberer. Entlarvung einer Legende ("Hitler the Conqueror, Debunking of a Myth") which is considered part of the German exile literature. The book was promptly banned by the Nazis. Shortly after its publication by Querido in Amsterdam, Olden's citizenship was revoked and he emigrated, together with his wife, first to the United Kingdom and then, in 1940, to the United States. On September 18 both died in the U-boat attack on the SS City of Benares in the Atlantic.
He was a German Liberal of the best sort, rather more pugnacious than the average British Liberal, because he had more to fight against.