Van Ginkel was born in Sumatra in 1940 and spent the first years of his life in a Japanese prison camp. After the war, his family returned to the Netherlands. There he went to the HBS and enrolled as a student at the Geographical Institute. That led to a job at Utrecht University in the late 1960s. He was there to obtain his doctorate, but then mainly taught. “The students were not sorry about that, Van Ginkel was an excellent and beloved lecturer,” the university said in an In Memoriam.
Utrecht University commemorates deceased rector magnificus Hans van Ginkel (83): ‘Sad, but grateful’
