BATMAN
09-20-2006, 10:33 AM
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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.
http://utah.indymedia.org/uploads/nazi-blond.jpgcz2cxf.jpg
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.
http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h102/Spiralina/nazibliterati.jpg
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.
http://utah.indymedia.org/uploads/nazi-blond.jpgcz2cxf.jpg
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.
http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h102/Spiralina/nazibliterati.jpg