Prosper Dezitter

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Prosper Dezitter (also known as Prosper de Zitter) (19 September 1893 – 17 September 1948) was a Belgian who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. He was nicknamed “the man with the missing finger.” Born in Passendale, he fled to Canada in 1913 after being convicted of rape, and briefly joined the Royal Air Force in 1918. He returned to Belgium in 1926, worked as a car salesman, and spent six years in prison for embezzlement and marriage fraud. During the German occupation, Dezitter pretended to be a Royal Canadian Air Force airman named "Captain Jackson" and infiltrated a resistance group led by Marcel Demonceau. He ran an escape line for downed Allied airmen, but this was a trap to capture airmen and resistance members, for which he was paid per capture. After the war, he was arrested in Germany, extradited to Belgium, and executed by firing squad in Ixelles on 17 September 1948, at age 54.