LUBEC – A man who helped start the land-rights movement in Maine died Friday after a long battle with cancer.

Ret. U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Robert Voight, 80, also will be remembered as a war hero.

Voight took up the battle of landowner rights in 1988, after he learned of a move to turn a portion of Washington County from Cutler to Lubec into a national park.

“It really started when … I was told they wanted to make a national park out of my 350 acres,” Voight said in a recent interview.Two years later, he helped found the Maine Conservation Rights Institute. For more than a decade, Voight’s group worked with other land-rights organizations at the state and national level to defend the property rights of Maine residents. Eventually the group had nearly 1,000 members.

Voight also was a member of the Washington County Economic Development Group and was one of the early members of the Lubec Economic Development Committee.

Former State Sen. Harry Vose called Voight a “super human being.”

“His mind clicked on things that others don’t necessarily think about, especially when he was fighting very hard over land issues, ” he said.

Voight joined the Army Air Corps in 1942 and was attached to the 448th Bomber Group stationed in Norwich, England.

In 1944, while on his 13th run, his plane, Baby Shoes, was shot down after a bombing run to Frankfurt, Germany. There were 11 men on board, but only Voight and his co-pilot survived.

“The plane blew up and fell apart, and I was blown out,” he said.

As soon as his parachute opened, he checked to see if he was injured. “I wasn’t,” he said. But he had lost one of his boots, and when he hit the ground, he crushed his right ankle and broke his back.

Members of the French Underground found him, but when they were about a mile away from the landing site, the truck they were in was surrounded and Voight was handed over to the German soldiers.

During that raid on Frankfort, the 448th lost an estimated 22 planes, but the raid was judged a success by the 8th Air Force.

The Germans took Voight to a hospital for treatment. Later he was placed in a prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag Luft III. On March 29, 1944, his family learned he was missing in action.

In 1945, after Allied Forces moved into the area, the Germans moved the prisoners to another POW camp. “There were four compounds at the camp, and there were about 10,000 POWs in each compound,” Voight recalled.

The veteran said he was transferred to another camp after Allied Forces started closing in. Because he could not walk, he and other injured POWs were placed in boxcars and taken to Nuremberg.

“There we starved. The Germans had no food for us,” he said.

Next the Americans were moved to the Mooseburg camp near Munich. “Finally we were freed by Patton’s 3rd Army,” he said. That was in 1945.

He retired from the Air Force in 1962.

In 1970,Voight and his wife, Christie, moved to Boot Cove in Lubec, where he became involved in the land-rights issue.

Vose pointed out that Voight wrote a number of editorial columns on the issue in the Bangor Daily News and other newspapers.

“People read them carefully. He made a lot of sense. In fact, I wish he would have run for politics, but he was too intelligent,” the former legislator said.

Although they did not agree on many issues, Vose said, he always respected Voight’s point of view.

“God love him, we lost a good man,” he said.

Voight is survived by his wife, of Lubec, son Robert Voight III, daughter-in-law Jennifer of North Andover, Mass., and grandson David Voight of Boston.