By Erik Kirschbaum
BERLIN (Reuters) - A prominent Jewish rights group said
on Thursday that an 83-year-old German woman deported from
the United States for hiding her Nazi past as a concentration
camp guard is a war criminal and should be prosecuted.
Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre that
tracks Nazis, said that U.S. authorities deserved praise
for their diligence in finding Elfriede Lina Rinkel. She
reportedly never told her late husband, a Holocaust survivor,
of her past.
The U.S. Justice Department said this week Rinkel, who went
to the United States in 1959, admitted she had served as
a guard at the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women
for the last 10 months of World War Two. She was deported
to Germany this month.
"
She is a war criminal, she volunteered to work as a guard
and walked around the camp watching over inmates with an
attack dog," Zuroff said in a telephone interview from
Jerusalem. "There's no room for misplaced sympathy.
I hope Germans will prosecute her."
A spokeswoman for the German Justice Ministry in Berlin
said they had not yet received any formal notification about
Rinkel's deportation. She added, however, the authorities
would be investigating if there were any grounds for suspicion
of crimes.
A spokesman for the German Interior Ministry said they also
have no information about Rinkel's return to Germany or her
whereabouts but said that as a German citizen it was possible
she arrived without fanfare.
Rinkel has reportedly returned to stay with a sister in
a town near Duesseldorf but local authorities said they have
no records of her registering with police as required.
Kurt Schrimm, state prosecutor and head of the Ludwigsburg
central agency for clarification of Nazi war crimes, said
he was informed about Rinkel by U.S. authorities but the
agency had no records of the woman, whose maiden name was
Huth.
"We've searched our archives but don't have anything
on her," said Schrimm, whose agency has investigated
100,000 cases and helped prosecutors in more than 6,000 cases.
Schrimm said if there was any indication that Rinkel had
committed murder the agency would investigate further into
her concentration camp work, but said that was not the case
so far.
Zuroff said that the Wiesenthal Centre also did not have
any archive material on Rinkel, who according to the charging
document filed in U.S. immigration court in San Francisco
used a trained attack dog to carry out her duties.
He said the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations deserved credit for finding Rinkel, who according
to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper had never told her
husband, a Jew who fled Nazi Germany, about her Nazi past.
Zuroff said the case was extraordinary. "It doesn't
happen every day," he said
today.reuters.co.uk
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