Convicted Nazi war criminal Jacob Luitjens is making a last-ditch attempt to avoid deportation to his native Holland.
The 72-year-old retired botany instructor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver filed an appeal in Supreme Court in Ottawa on Tuesday.
Luitjens was stripped of his Canadian citizenship Nov. 7 after a court ruled that he had knowingly concealed his past Nazi ties when he immigrated from Paraguay to Canada in 1961.
His appeal was rejected by the Federal Court of Appeals last week, setting in motion the procedures for sending him back to the Netherlands.
Luitjens was convicted in absentia by a Dutch court in 1948 on charges of “aiding and abetting the enemy in time of war.” He drew a life sentence.
A former member of the Dutch Nazi Party and of the Landwacht, a paramilitary unit that helped the Gestapo round up Jews and resistance fighters, he was active in the Groningen and Drenthe provinces in northeastern Holland during the war.
Luitjens could become the first person deported under the new extradition treaty between Canada and Holland that took effect last December.
The Dutch had requested extradition under the old treaty in 1981. But the Canadian courts decided that it did not cover the crime of collaboration.
Since the Criminal Code was amended in 1987 to allow Canadian courts to try war crimes suspects for crimes committed abroad, Canada has successfully prosecuted only one of several cases that have come to trial.
In 1983, Albert Helmut Rauca of Toronto was extradited to West Germany to stand trial for the murder of 11,585 Jews in the ghetto of Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, during the war.
Rauca died before the trial could open.
Other alleged war criminals tried in Canada have been acquitted or had charges dismissed for lack of evidence.
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.
