Maria Jacobsen

Maria Jacobsen (, ; 1882 – 1960) was a Danish missionary, aid worker, nurse and a key witness to the Armenian genocide. Jacobsen wrote the Diaries of a Danish Missionary: Harpoot, 1907–1919, which according to Armenian genocide scholar Ara Sarafian, is "documentation of the utmost significance" for research of the Armenian genocide. Jacobsen is known as ″Mama″ for her humanitarian efforts and having saved many Armenians during the genocide.

Early life Maria Jacobsen was born in the then village of Siim, Denmark (present-day, Ry) on the 6 November 1882 and as a child, she lived in Horsens with her father Jens Jacobsen and mother Ane Kristine Pedersen. At an early age, Jacobsen had learned about the massacres of Armenians during the Hamidian massacres from the Danish media. Christian organizations throughout the world started a campaign to express their solidarity with the Armenians and to serve to help them. When Jessie Penn-Lewis, a feminist activist, came to Denmark from England in 1898, she helped form the Women's Missionary Workers (K.M.A.; Danish: Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere) in 1900. Jacobsen soon participated in the support and relief efforts of orphans in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

In a diary entry regarding the deportation of Armenians, on 26 June 1915, Jacobsen stated that, "it is quite obvious that the purpose of their departure is the extermination of the Armenian people." Jacobsen then wrote about males over the age of nine who were taken to a mosque under the guardianship of "Kurds and gendarmes" who returned with their clothes covered with blood.

When she started she had absolutely nothing to work with, except American financial backing and her nerve. She could not get food enough this way, so, though she knew nothing of farming, she rented a farm and had her orphans raise much of their own foodstuffs. She could get no cloth, so she bought wool and had the girls knit garments. But of course they were not satisfactory for underclothes, so she rigged up a little cotton mill, bought cotton, and made cloth. She also made her own shoes, and of course had to grind her own flour.

He went on at great length, finally concluding, “Believe me, she did a wonderful work, and she is just a youngster herself.”

Gallery Maria Jacobsen collected a series of photographs which she kept in her diary in 1919: