Jacob Luitjens, UBC prof deported as Nazi collaborator, dies at 103

Jacob Luitjens, a Dutch-born UBC botany professor who lived quietly for years in Canada before he was deported to the Netherlands in 1992 to serve a decades-old prison sentence for collaborating with the Nazis, has died at 103.

Maarten van Gestel, a journalist for the Dutch newspaper Trouw who chronicled Luitjens’s story in a podcast released last year, said a caretaker informed him on Dec. 15 of Mr. Luitjens’s recent death. Other details were not immediately available.

Stripped of his Canadian citizenship, Mr. Luitjens had lived in Lemmer, a town in the north of the Netherlands, since his release from a Dutch detention centre in 1995.

As the last Nazi collaborator imprisoned in the Netherlands for wartime crimes, Luitjens represented “the end of a chapter,” Van Gestel said.

Decades into his years as a fugitive, he became known as “the terror of Roden,” a reference to the city where he had worn the black uniform of the Landwacht, or Land Guard, a Dutch paramilitary group that helped the Nazis arrest Jews, resistance fighters and other targets of the Third Reich after Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940.