German Grandmother Deported After Her Nazi Past Comes to Light

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LOS ANGELES — A German woman who for more than 60 years kept secret her role as a Nazi concentration camp guard, never telling her Jewish husband, has been deported from America after officials uncovered her past.

Elfriede Rinkel, 84, described as a “nice, sweet lady” by neighbors in San Francisco, confessed to working with an SS-trained attack dog at the Ravensbruck women’s labor camp near Furstenberg, where an estimated 90,000 people, many of them Jews, died.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Mrs. Rinkel was a guard at the camp between June 1944 and April 1945, when the Nazis abandoned it.

More than 10,000 women died during the year that Mrs. Rinkel worked there, some after being gassed or undergoing medical experiments, others from starvation and disease.

When questioned, Mrs. Rinkel, who was not a member of the Nazi party, claimed that she never used her dog as a weapon against the prisoners.

She said she had volunteered to be a dog handler because it paid more than her job as a factory worker.

Relatives of Mrs. Rinkel, whose late husband was a German Jew who fled the Holocaust, expressed shock at the news, which came to light on Tuesday with the release of court documents.

Mrs. Rinkel left America on September 1, telling friends and family that she was returning to Germany because of problems with her San Francisco apartment. It was not clear how American authorities discovered her past, but a Justice Department spokesman said it was routine for investigators to compare guard rosters and other Nazi documents with immigration records.

“Concentration camp guards such as Elfriede Rinkel played a vital role in the Nazi regime’s horrific mistreatment of innocent victims,” a Justice Department lawyer, Alice Fisher, said.

“This case reflects the government’s unwavering commitment to remove Nazi persecutors from this country.”

Officials knocked on Mrs. Rinkel’s door shortly after her husband, Fred, died in 2004. She confessed to her role in the camp and struck an agreement with prosecutors to surrender her green card, move back to Germany, and never return to America. She now lives with a sister in Viersen.

Authorities agreed not to release any information about her case until after her departure. Mrs. Rinkel, who immigrated to America in 1959, had attended synagogue with her husband and had planned to be buried alongside him in a Jewish cemetery. The couple had no children.

Her lawyer, Alison Dixon, said the marriage could “have been a type of atonement for her.” She told the San Francisco Chronicle: “My understanding is that she has also contributed to Jewish charities.”

Mrs. Rinkel is the first woman to be prosecuted by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, formed in 1979.


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