Nazi guard woman married Jew; now deported

Nazi guard woman married Jew; now deported

By DEMIAN BULWA
September 19, 2006

Those who knew Elfriede Rinkel never found it remarkable that the German immigrant married a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, or attended synagogue with him, or planned to be buried next to him at a cemetery run by a Jewish burial society.

This week, though, came a jarring twist: The Justice Department said the 84-year-old Rinkel had been deported to Germany, nearly half a century after she emigrated to the United States, because she had been a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in World War II where an estimated 90,000 people, many of them Jews, were exterminated.

"I think it may have been a type of atonement for her," her attorney, Alison Dixon, said of Elfriede's marriage to Fred Rinkel, who died two years ago. "My understanding is that she has also contributed to Jewish charities."

Dixon said Rinkel never told her husband that she had spent nearly a year as a guard at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, the only major Nazi camp for women.

She might not have told anyone in the United States - including her brother and his wife, who dropped her off at San Francisco International Airport on Aug. 31. Rinkel told them she was returning to Germany because she was having problems with her apartment in San Francisco. It wasn't until Tuesday that the couple learned the truth from reporters.

"I just don't have any words," said Rinkel's brother, an 82-year-old Berkeley resident who asked that his name be withheld because he is afraid of a possible backlash. "I don't have any feelings anymore. Life has given me too many things. I cannot accept it, let's just put it that way."

The government said Rinkel, a permanent resident alien who never applied for U.S. citizenship, had admitted after a two-year investigation that she had guarded female prisoners at Ravensbruck from June 1944 to April 1945, when the Nazis abandoned the camp to the advancing Allies. She now lives with her younger sister in the German city of Viersen, her brother said.

Rinkel is the first woman prosecuted by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which was formed in 1979.

Eli Rosenbaum, director of the office, would not say how the government found out about Rinkel. But he said, "She was an integral part of the machinery of destruction and persecution at Ravensbruck."

Rinkel's brother said he fought in the German army and was captured by U.S. forces in North Africa, and as a result he was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Wyoming when his sister allegedly worked at Ravensbruck. He immigrated to America in 1950 and nine years later petitioned for his sister to join him.

Rinkel soon met her future husband at an event for German Americans.

Fred Rinkel, who grew up in a prominent family in Berlin, fled Germany with a brother as Nazi persecution of the Jews spread. He had trained to be an opera tenor in Germany, but after making his way to San Francisco he settled on a job as a singing waiter. Elfriede Rinkel worked as a furrier.

Fred Rinkel died of a heart attack Jan. 21, 2004, and was buried at the Eternal Home Cemetery in Colma, Calif. Elfriede Rinkel planned to be buried beside him, the cemetery said. It's not clear now whether that will still happen, although under an agreement with the Justice Department, she can be buried on U.S. soil.

(www.scrippsnews.com.)