Businessman and Social Liberal public figure who led the underground resistance in Ghent during World War II, which ultimately costed him his life.
He fought in World War I from 1915 until 1918, serving in the occupational force in Germany in 1918.
He was arrested by the Nazis in October 1943 and died in the Grosz Rosen Nazi concentration camp located close to Breslau in December 1944.
He was born into a well-known textile family; he married Cecile Boddaert, the cousin of the President of the Ghent Liberal Association Henri Boddaert.
He opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi occupation of Ghent from the beginning, joining the local resistance in 1940 and refusing to release information about his employees to them.