Hans Christian Hansen

Born Nov. 8, in Århus; died Feb. 19, 1960, in Copenhagen. Danish state and political figure.

The son of a shoemaker, Hansen was a printer by trade. He became secretary of the Social Democratic Youth League in 1929 and served as the league’s chairman from 1933 to 1936. From 1935 to 1939 he was chairman of the Socialist Youth International. In 1936, Hansen was elected a deputy to the Folketing from the Social Democratic Party of Denmark (SDPD). He was secretary of the party from 1939 to 1941 and from 1945 to 1953.

During World War II, Hansen served on an interparty committee, made up of representatives of the SDPD and Denmark’s moderate bourgeois parties, that worked with the resistance movement. He was finance minister in 1945 and from 1947 to 1950, and he was foreign minister from 1953 to 1955 and from 1955 to 1958. From 1955 to 1960 he served as prime minister of Denmark and as chairman of the SDPD. In March 1956, Hansen became the first head of the Danish government to pay an official visit to the USSR, an act that fostered Danish-Soviet friendship.