Jacob Luitjens

Jacob Luitjens, born on April eighteenth, nineteen nineteen in Buitenzorg, Dutch East Indies, was a botanist and university teacher whose life was marked by a controversial past. During World War II, he became known as the 'terror of Roden' for his role as a Dutch collaborator, actively participating in the persecution of Jews and communists in the Drenthe Province.

After the war, Luitjens faced serious repercussions for his actions. On September tenth, nineteen forty-eight, he was convicted in absentia to life imprisonment as a war criminal. However, he evaded justice by fleeing to Paraguay, aided by Mennonites, and assumed the alias 'Gerhard Harder'. In nineteen sixty-one, he immigrated to Canada, where he took on the role of an instructor in the Department of Botany at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, living a life shrouded in silence.

His past caught up with him in nineteen ninety-two when the Frisian Jack Kooistra, known as 'the Frisian Simon Wiesenthal', tracked him down. Following this revelation, Luitjens was stripped of his Canadian citizenship and deported to the Netherlands, where he resumed his life sentence in a Groningen prison until March nineteen ninety-five. The Canadian government subsequently forbade his return, leaving him without a nationality.

In January twenty twenty-two, at the age of one hundred and two, Luitjens granted an interview, reflecting on his long and tumultuous life. He passed away on December fourteenth, twenty twenty-two, at the age of one hundred and three, marking the end of an era as he was the last known living member of the NSB.