Armband with a royal coat of arms worn by Danish resistance fighter

Mogens Høirup was born in 1907 in Denmark. His father, Christian Hoirup, was the superintendent of Ranum College, a teacher training college in Limfjorden. Mogens became a history teacher. He and his wife Karen had two daughters. On April 9, 1940, Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany. The German occupation regime controlled Denmark’s foreign policy, but permitted the Danes to administer domestic affairs. In 1942, Mogens and Karen took over Grindsted Cost and Realskole, a private boarding school in Grindsted. The benign attitude of the German occupation regime began to change in 1943. The resistance movement had grown more active as Germany encountered military defeat in the Soviet Union. On August 28, the Danish government resigned, rather than agree to German demands to try saboteurs before German military courts. The next day, the Germany military commander declared martial law. In late September, news leaked of the German decision to deport all the Jews in Denmark to concentration camps. The Danish resistance, with widespread public support, organized a rescue operation that ferried over 7000 Jewish citizens and refugees to safety in Sweden in one month. The Germans deported nearly 500 Jews to Theresienstadt. Mogens became actively involved with the resistance movement around this time. In 1944, he was the leader of the underground network in Jutland. On October 6, he was arrested by the German authorities. He was held in Staldgarden prison in Kolding, and, on November 23, transferred to Froslevlejren internment camp. On January 1945, he was incarcerated in Neuengamme concentration camp in Germany. He was released in April 1945, due to a rescue operation organized by Count Folke Bernadotte, Vice President of the Swedish Red Cross. Bernadotte negotiated the release of nearly 15,000 Scandinavian and western European prisoners, including Jewish inmates, from German concentration camps. They were transported on white buses to hospitals in Sweden. Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. After recuperating in a Swedish hospital, Mogens returned on May 17 to Grindsted. He resumed his position as headmaster. Mogens, 49, died in 1956.

The armband was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2011 by Hanne and Howard E. Kulin, the daughter and son-in-law of Mogens Høirup.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Hanne and Howard E. Kulin

Funding Note: The cataloging of this artifact has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.