For more than 60 years Elfriede Lina Rinkel hid a terrible
secret. To her family, friends and Jewish husband Fred, Mrs
Rinkel was one of many Germans who had fled to the US after
the second world war seeking a better life.
But yesterday the 84-year-old's extraordinary past caught
up with her. American officials said Mrs Rinkel had been
deported from her San Francisco home to Germany after US
investigators discovered she had worked as a guard in a Nazi
concentration camp.
Mrs Rinkel's shocked relatives, who did not want to be identified,
said yesterday they had had no idea about her wartime activities.
She had concealed her past for half a century not only from
them but also from her husband - a German Jew who fled the
Holocaust. He died two years ago and almost certainly knew
nothing of the truth, they said.
"It knocked us off our feet," Mrs Rinkel's sister-in-law
told the Oakland Tribune newspaper. "We have many Jewish
friends who live in the Oakland/Berkeley area. This would
be quite shocking for them as it was to us."
According to the US justice ministry, Mrs Rinkel worked
at Ravensbrück concentration camp, north of Berlin,
from June 1944 to April 1945. She used an SS-trained dog.
Documents released by the ministry's office of special investigations,
set up to track down fugitive Nazis, include her service
card, taken from an SS centre, and bank records.
The camp, completed in 1939 by the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler,
was built almost exclusively for female prisoners. Within
a few years it had evolved into a brutal slave labour camp
where "undesirable" women - first German opponents
of the Nazi regime and prostitutes and criminals, later Jews
and Gypsies - were held, experimented on and killed.
More than 130,000 women passed through Ravensbrück,
near the town of Fürstenberg. Most came from Poland
or the occupied Soviet Union. Only 40,000 survived. The Red
Army liberated the camp in April 1945, but arrived after
Nazi troops took thousands of inmates on a forced march,
where many died.
Last night Ephraim Zuroff, the head of the Nazi-hunting
Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, said Mrs Rinkel's story
was typical. Many low-ranking Germans who collaborated with
the Nazis kept silent about their role to family and friends
for decades afterwards, he said. He conceded, however, that
what made Mrs Rinkel's case extraordinary was that she had
then married a German Jew. "In my profession you often
come across close family members who didn't have a clue what
their parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts or sisters had
done during world war two. The most painful moment is when
they find out. The kids are always devastated.
"But I would never make the mistake of having any sympathy
for these people. Ravensbrück was a concentration camp.
Thousands of people died here as a result of Nazi policies."
Since Mrs Rinkel's return to Germany this month, her whereabouts
is unknown. Yesterday officials from Germany's Nazi investigations
unit told the Guardian they would not try to arrest her since
any crimes she might have committed would have "expired".
Under Germany's statute of limitations, only murder committed
while working for the Nazis can be investigated.
According to her sister-in-law, who was married to Mrs Rinkel's
brother, Fred Rinkel had no idea of his wife's dark past.
His funeral service was held at a Jewish memorial chapel
and he was an active member of the Jewish service organisation
B'nai B'rith. "He had to leave Germany during all that
terrible stuff that happened there and had to relocate in
Shanghai," she said. "A lot of the Jewish Germans
went to Shanghai."
According to US charges filed in April, Elfriede Huth was
born July 14 1922 in the east German city of Leipzig. She
applied for a US immigrant visa in Frankfurt in 1959. The
application told her to list all her residences from 1938,
but she omitted Ravensbrück. She was admitted to the
US in September 1959 at San Francisco, the document says.
Her sister-in-law said Mrs Rinkel had met her husband decades
ago at a German-American Club in San Francisco. She lived
in the US until her deportation. "We did help her to
close up her apartment and helped her to buy her airplane
ticket and go to the airport and buy her luggage - but never
a word about why she was leaving," she told the newspaper. "We
thought she was going because her situation in her apartment
had deteriorated."
Mrs Rinkel had arthritis, and her flat's lift was often
out of service. "She said she just wanted to go back
to Germany ... we believed her."
German historians said Mrs Rinkel had been one of about
3,500 young, unattached and mainly uneducated women from
Germany and Austria who were overseers at the camp, some
of whom were later executed. Horst Seferens of the Brandenburg
foundation that now administers Ravensbrück said in
the summer of 1944 hundreds of women had been forced into
employment: "Many SS men had been sent to the front.
The number of camps was rapidly expanded. More women were
needed to watch over the growing numbers of prisoners."
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