After a deportation procedure in Canada that spanned a decade, Nazi collaborator Jacob Luitjens was extradited to Holland last Friday, where he was immediately transferred to jail.
Luitjens, a 73-year-old retired botany instructor, lost his struggle to remain in Canada. He was expelled because he had lied about his past, which included conviction in absentia in Holland for war crimes.
After failing to appeal a deportation order issued Nov. 23, Luitjens was picked up at his home by Canadian immigration officials and taken to Vancouver International Airport for the flight to Holland.
Dutch authorities arrested Luitjens as soon as he arrived. His arrest was covered widely by the Dutch media.
His extradition was hailed by Jewish groups, such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Sol Littman, director of its Canadian office in Toronto, emphasized that “the Dutch government has never lost interest in the case.”
Dutch special prosecutor Marquart Scholz said a cell had been prepared for Luitjens in the regional holding center in Groningen, which is very close to his native village of Roden.
There, Luitjens was a member of the Landwacht, a local police force established by the Nazis to round up Jews and resistance fighters.
Luitjens was arrested in 1945 immediately after Holland was liberated from the Nazis. He managed to escape in 1947 from the detention camp where he was held and fled to Paraguay.
In the Netherlands, he was sentenced to a life term in absentia by a special tribunal for having been a member of the Dutch Nazi police.
In 1961 he arrived in Canada, where he became a lecturer in botany at the University of Vancouver. In 1971 he applied for and received Canadian citizenship.
Some years later, he was recognized by someone from his native region. Dutch authorities tried to have him extradited, but since he was a Canadian citizen, this was impossible.
There was also no extradition treaty between the two countries, a matter that was rectified last December with the signing of such a treaty.
Earlier this year, Canada revoked Luitjens’ Canadian citizenship on the grounds that he lied to authorities about his past.
Luitjens’ brother has submitted a request for a royal pardon. If that fails, Luitjens is expected to appeal his conviction by claiming it was an illegal sentence because he was not present for the proceedings.
Luitjeans’ deportation came just hours before B’nai Brith Canada issued a 94- page report expressing its concern over Canada’s failure to prosecute successfully known war criminals residing in the country.
Canada’s war-crimes law is five years old. “We have to look at the results,” said David Matas, a spokesman for B’nai Birth Canada and author of a 1987 book on the subject, “Justice Delayed: Nazi War Criminals in Canada.
Two criminal cases were dropped for lack of evidence. Two civil prosecutions resulted in deportation — that of Luitjens and Albert Rauca, who was extradited to West Germany in May 1983.
One criminal trial, that of Imre Finta, ended in acquittal.
“The bottom line, after five years, is not satisfactory,” said Matas, who is an immigration lawyer in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
B’nai Brith Canada claims that judges, juries and the general public are not convinced of the need to try war criminals.
In its report, the organization points to a recent case in Ottawa, where a judge dropped charges against Michael Pawlowski after ruling that videotapes of witnesses living in the former Soviet Union were not valid.
The report also criticizes Justice James Chadwick of the Ontario Court, who sat on the Pawlowski case. Pawlowski, of Renfrew, Ontario, had been charged with the killing of 490 Jews and Poles in Byelorussia (Belarus) in 1942.
Canada’s justice minister, Kim Campbell, admitted there is a problem with the system.
“Yes, it’s difficult in front of the courts,” she said. “But I am not sure that the mind-set is necessarily a negative one. There is concern about the evidence of people testifying about things that happened a long time ago.”
B’nai Brith believes that Canada should concentrate on deporting war criminals rather than prosecuting them. But Campbell expressed concern about “whether the courts will see that as an abusive process.”
Nevertheless, Campbell welcomed the report and added that things would have been better “if the war crimes legislation had been in place 30 years ago instead of just five.”
(Contributing to this report were JTA correspondent Gary Pogrow in Vancouver and Gil Kezwer in Toronto.)
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
