Arne Munch-Petersen

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Arne Munch-Petersen (1904–1940) was a Danish communist politician. He was born on September 30, 1904, in Frederiksberg, Denmark, to law professor Hans Munch-Petersen and Lina Johanna Mandl. He studied at the Metropolitan School and was in the same cohort as other future communists Mogens Fog and Otto Melchior. He joined the Danish Communist Party (DKP) in 1925 and served in the Danish Parliament (Folketing) from 1932 to 1935. In January 1936 he became the DKP’s representative in the Communist International (Comintern).

From 1935 until his death he was married to Elna Hiort-Lorenzen. In 1937, during Stalin’s purges, he was arrested by the NKVD and held in solitary confinement. He died in 1940 at Butyrka Prison in Moscow from chronic tuberculosis. His fate was not known to the Danish public until 1989, when the historian Kurt Jacobsen uncovered information in Soviet archives. It later emerged that the Danish DKP chairman Aksel Larsen not only knew what happened but had lied to Elna Hiort-Lorenzen about her husband’s fate. Ole Sohn later wrote a biography, Fra Folketinget til celle 290, about Munch-Petersen’s life and death.