Former concentration camp guard deported to Germany, after her Jewish husb

Ex-Nazi hid past even from husband

           Posted on Wed, Sep. 20, 2006



            Ex-Nazi hid past even from husband

            By Josh Richman
            MediaNews

            For more than 60 years, Elfriede Lina Rinkel kept a dark secret
from her family: In the waning days of World War II, she worked as a guard
in a Nazi concentration camp.

            When federal agents finally confronted the woman, now 84, and
eventually deported her, relatives say she still didn't reveal the real
reason behind her flight back to Germany.

            ``It knocked us off our feet,'' Rinkel's sister-in-law said from
her home in Berkeley on Tuesday, after the Justice Department announced
Rinkel's deportation. The sister-in-law, along with her husband, Rinkel's
brother, asked not to be identified. ``We have many, many Jewish friends . .
.. and this would be quite shocking to them as it was to us.''

            Rinkel also kept the secret from her late husband -- a German
Jew who had fled the Holocaust himself. Fred William Rinkel ``did not
know,'' her lawyer, Allison Dixon, told the Los Angeles Times, ``because all
these years she was totally embarrassed.''

            She is the only woman to be caught and deported in more than 100
completed cases of Nazi persecutors who lied their way into the United
States.

            U.S. officials caught up with Rinkel not long after her husband
died. After tracking her down to her San Francisco apartment, they charged
her under a federal law that requires the removal of foreign nationals who
participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution. She signed a settlement in June,
admitting that from June 1944 to April 1945 she was a guard at the
Ravensbrück camp, built near Fürstenberg, Germany, almost exclusively for
female prisoners.

            According to documents released Tuesday, Rinkel used a trained
SS guard dog at the camp. The Office of Special Investigations also provided
copies of her service card, taken from an SS records office, and bank
records showing pay she received for her service at the camp.

            An estimated 130,000 women and children were imprisoned within
Ravensbrück's walls, and about 90,000 died from starvation, execution,
weakness or medical experimentation. The inmates came mostly from Poland and
the occupied Soviet territories; almost 15 percent were Jewish.

            The government's charges, filed in April, say Elfriede Rinkel
was born July 14, 1922, in Leipzig, Germany; served at the camp from 1944 to
1945; and applied for a U.S. immigrant visa Aug. 29, 1959, at the U.S.
Consulate in Frankfurt. The visa application instructed her to list all her
residences from 1938 forward, but she omitted Ravensbrück.

            Rinkel was admitted as an immigrant to the United States on or
about Sept. 21, 1959, at San Francisco, the document says. Her
sister-in-law, who with Rinkel's brother had sponsored her immigration, said
Tuesday that Elfriede Huth met Fred Rinkel decades ago at a German-American
Club in San Francisco.

            Rinkel's husband died in January 2004; his obituary said he was
a longtime member of the Jewish service organization B'nai B'rith, and his
funeral services were held at a Jewish memorial chapel. The couple had
planned to be buried side by side in a Jewish cemetery in Colma. Rinkel's
sister-in-law said Rinkel's brother had never learned of his sister's
wartime activity because he had been captured by U.S. troops while fighting
for the German army in North Africa.

            Even as Rinkel's relatives were helping her to pack up her
apartment on Bush Street, two blocks up Nob Hill from Union Square, they
said they still knew nothing of her past.

            ``Never a word about why she was leaving,'' Rinkel's
sister-in-law said. ``She said she just wanted to go back to Germany, and
because she told us that, we believed her.''

            Rinkel was discovered after investigators compared Ravensbrück
guard rosters with U.S. immigration documents -- some 70,000 names have been
studied since the Office of Special Investigations opened in 1979 -- and
stumbled upon her maiden name.


            She admitted being assigned to the camp, explaining that she had
had a less desirable job as a factory worker and then volunteered to be a
dog handler at the camp for better wages.

            But she insisted she never used her dog as a weapon against the
prisoners, never forced them into marches every morning to work or to die.
She said never joined the Nazi Party, just did its bidding, according to the
Los Angeles Times.

            Dixon, her San Francisco attorney, told the Los Angeles Times
that it was all just too long ago. She said her client had tried to remake
her life and never thought she would be tripped up so late in her years.

            ``She was trying to atone for actions in the past,'' Dixon
said.. ``She married a Jewish man, and she gave to Jewish charities.

            Only in death can Rinkel return to the United States. However,
before she left, she sold her plot in Colma's Eternal Home Cemetery --
giving up the double gravestone with the Star of David above the couple's
names..


--------------------------------------------------------------------
            The Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.