Portrait photograph by Judy Glickman of founding member of Danish resistance

Frode Jakobsen was born on December 21, 1906, in Oster Jolby, Denmark, to Ole Jakobsen, a school teacher, born in 1854, and Ane Mette Lorensten, born in 1874. His family was poor and he attended a Grundtvigian school, a privately run folk school movement which focuses on a diverse, humanistic education and active participation in society. He worked as a farm hand for 6 years before attending the Viborg Cathedral School, from which he graduated in 1929. During the 1930s, he traveled to Germany as an illegal courier in an effort to aid Germans who wished to leave following the establishment of Nazi government in 1933. He married Ruth Goldstein, an X-ray assistant, in Copenhagen on January 23, 1937. In 1939, he graduated from the University of Copenhagen with a Masters degree in German. Germany invaded Denmark on April 9, 1940. In 1941, Frode formed the resistance group, Ringen [the Ring]. The group printed uncensored newspapers and traveled throughout Denmark to encourage support against the German occupation. In September 1943, Frode co-founded the Danish Freedom Council in an attempt to coordinate the efforts of the various resistance groups. It was made up of seven Danish representatives and a member of the Special Operations Executive, an organization which supported the resistance movement throughout Europe. By 1944, the Council operated an extensive publishing operation. The movement grew to over 20,000 members and acts of sabotage against the Germans increased. In the fall of 1944, Frode established a cooperative effort between politicians and resistance leaders to formulate a plan for a postwar government. On May 7, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Forces and withdrew from Denmark. Frode became a minister without portfolio in the new government. He joined the Danish Social Democratic party and was elected to Parliament in October 1945, serving until 1973. He served in the Home Guard from 1948-1971, as President of the European Movement from 1951-1954, and as chairman of the Danish delegation to the United Nations from 1962-1966. His first wife, Ruth, died in 1974 and Frode married Agnes Maria Male on August 6, 1977, in Solrod, Denmark. In 1995, the Frode Jakobsen prize for exceptional courage in politics, in conjunction with the defunct political organization, the June Movement, was established. Frode authored several books and died on June 15, 1997, in Denmark, at the age of 90.

Judy Ellis Glickman is a photographer and the daughter of Dr. Irving Bennett and Louise Ellis. Her father was a noted CAlifornia pictorialist photographer in the 1930s and 1940s. She pursued photography at a young age and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959 from the University of California at Los Angeles. She studied photography at UCLA from 1978-1985, the Maine Photographic Workshop from 1978-87, and the Portland School of Art from 1984-1985. Her grandparents emigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, and her mother and grandmother in 1914. Though not a child of a Holocaust survivor, it was while visiting concentration camps in Poland in 1988 that she began to wonder how many unknown family members perished. During this trip, the work became more personal, real, and meaningful to her. She returns to Europe every year to visit and photograph Holocaust sites. She was asked by the Thanks to Scandinavia Foundation to create a photographic narrative documenting the Danish rescue effort. She has exhibited extensively and won numerous awards. Both her sons are rabbis. She is on the board of the Portland Museum of Art in Maine and is a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in England.

The photograph was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2010 by Judith Ellis Glickman.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Judith Ellis Glickman

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