Jacob Luitjens

Who is Jacob Luitjens?

Jacob Luitjens was a Dutch collaborator during World War II. He was nicknamed The terror of Roden, as he was active in and around Roden in the Drenthe Province.

After the war, on 10 September 1948, he was convicted in absentia to life imprisonment. Luitjens evaded this punishment by fleeing to Paraguay, aided by Mennonites, using the name "Gerhard Harder". After that, he emigrated to Canada in 1961, where he became an instructor in the Department of Botany at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Students in the department knew him as an almost completely silent "ghost-like" man.

The Frisian Jack Kooistra, also known as 'the Frisian Simon Wiesenthal', managed to track down Luitjens in 1992. Luitjens was stripped of his Canadian citizenship and was deported to the Netherlands. At a court in Assen, he was convicted and sentenced to an imprisonment of 28 months. He served this term, until March 1995 in a prison in Groningen. Afterwards, the Canadian government forbade his return to Canada. Luitjens has been without a nationality since then.

Ian Kagedan of B'nai Brith Canada characterized the deportation as part of an ongoing "quest" to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.