RT Journal Article
T1 Museum-led repatriation of Second World War human remains: the case of Preben Holger Larsen
A1 Alexandra Eveleigh
A1 Laura Humphreys
A1 Jenny Shaw
A1 Anna Wagn
YR 2025
VO 
IS Autumn 2025
K1 Collections management
K1 Human remains
K1 Mindelunden Memorial Park
K1 Museum documentation
K1 Preben Holger Larsen
K1 Repatriation
AB In 2022, the ashes of Preben Holger Larsen were repatriated to Denmark, and interred at the Mindelunden Memorial Park on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Larsen was a member of the Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation of Denmark during the Second World War, and for this was imprisoned at Neuengamme Concentration Camp in northern Germany, where he was killed in 1944. However, after the end of the war, Larsen was listed on a Memorial at Mindelunden for those Danish freedom fighters whose remains had never been found. 
Larsen’s cremated remains had, in fact, been taken from Neuengamme by Frederick Murgatroyd, a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army Medical Corps, and brought back to the UK. After Murgatroyd’s death in the 1950s, the urn containing Larsen’s ashes, together with twenty photographs from Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen, was given to the former Wellcome Museum of Medical Science in London, and in 1982, loaned to the Science Museum with the rest of the Wellcome museum collection. 
In this article, we explore how Larsen’s remains came to be in a museum collection, how they were rediscovered and their identity confirmed, and the efforts towards their repatriation. The ethical collections management of human remains in museums is a complex and evolving field, and repatriation is receiving significant attention across the sector. This is an unusual case, but one with important lessons in collections management, archival research, public access to museum documentation, and the review of human remains in museum collections.  
 
Content advisory: 
This paper contains frank discussions about human remains in museums, and in relation to Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, concentration camps, and the Holocaust. This article contains a photograph of an urn, but it does not contain any photographs of human remains.  
NO Larsen, K T and Wagn, A, 2025: De dødes marker – skæbner fra den danske modstandskamp (København: Grønningen 1), pp 147–148.
NO Statsadvokaten for Særlige Anliggender, AS-sager for København, AS-sag nr. 23231 ‘Vedr. Preben Holger Larsen’, The Danish National Archive.
NO Sterberkunde, Preben Holger Larsen, 22.11.1944, Doc ID (Arolson Archiv), Krankenrevir Totenbuch 1943–1944 (Gedenkstätte Neuengamme Archiv), Larsen, K T, Wagn A, 2025: De dødes marker – skæbner fra den danske modstandskamp, pp 174–175.
NO Science Museum digital catalogue description, undated, accessed [15 September, 2025]. The Science Museum retains historic descriptions of objects in Mimsy XG even after they have been updated.
NO https://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/person_advance_search.php (accessed 8 June 2025).
NO For the purposes of disambiguation, the phrase ‘Wellcome museum collection’ in this article refers to the collection of objects amassed under the direction of Henry Wellcome, and now in the long-term care of the Science Museum Group. This is distinct from the ‘Wellcome Collection’, which is the museum organisation headquartered on Euston Road and part of the Wellcome Trust, from which the historic objects are loaned.
NO The relationship between Wellcome and the Science Museum was explored in a 2020 special issue of the Science Museum Group Journal, ‘Curating Medicine’ https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/issue/autumn-2020/
NO Letter from Mabel Murgatroyd to C J Hackett, T/A681112, the Science Museum Group.
NO See The Papers of Professor Frederick Murgatroyd, Wellcome Collection Archives and Manuscripts GC/27/A/5.
NO Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Group cases, UM 84.G. 1r, ‘Notiz’ 24.2.1945, The Danish National Archive.
NO Science Museum Group Human Remains Policy 2024: 10.2.
NO Márquez-Grant, Nicholas (2020), Senior Lecturer in Forensic Anthropology, Cranfield Institute. Email to Natasha McEnroe, Keeper of Medicine, Science Museum, 17 February 2020.
PB The Science Museum Group
SN 2054-5770
LA eng
DO 10.15180/252407
UL https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/museum-led-repatriation-of-second-world-war-human-remains-the-case-of-preben-holger-larsen/
WT Science Museum Group Journal
OL 30