Washington – She lived alone in a tiny, top-floor apartment in one of the tougher sections of San Francisco. At 83, she was short and a bit stout. Diabetes took the sight in one of her eyes; arthritis left her leaning heavily on a cane. For long trips, she took a taxi.
Her husband had died. He was the love of her long life, a short, dapper man who had worked as a bartender and waiter at some of the city’s larger hotels and was active in Jewish activities. They buried him in a Jewish cemetery outside the city.
He had been gone just a short while when the two officials from the Justice Department in Washington knocked on her door. They confronted her with a terrible secret that all these years she had managed to keep from him.
In Germany during World War II, a much younger, still-single Elfriede Lina Rinkel, the girl with the blue eyes and the striking red hair, had worked as an SS guard at one of the Nazi regime’s infamous concentration camps.
Called Ravensbruck, it was a slave labor prison for women, and during the year she worked there with a trained attack dog more than 10,000 women died.
Some succumbed to starvation and disease. Others were gassed. More died after cruel medical experiments. Some perished from sheer exhaustion.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that the woman with the pleasant smile and the German accent had been deported to Germany.
She admitted that she had lied on her U.S. visa application.
Her lawyer, Allison Dixon, said she never told Fred, her husband. Not during their romance after the war, on their wedding night in Germany or their voyage to a new life in America. Always, she kept quiet.
“He did not know,” the lawyer said, “because all these years she was totally embarrassed.”
Washington officials, however, said she offered no expression of remorse about her past and did not fight deportation.
She was given until Sept. 30 to leave the United States. She left Sept. 1. Some distant relations took her in, and she dutifully reported to the U.S. Consulate office in Frankfurt, Germany, that she was back home.
Eighty-three is a hard time to make one’s life over, and Dixon said that she could still face charges in Germany for her war-time duty at the concentration camp. But whatever happens, she likely now will die in the land of her birth.
Alive, she is legally barred from re-entering the U.S. In death alone could she be returned.
She will be remembered as the only woman to be caught and deported in more than 100 completed cases of Nazi persecutors who lied their way into the U.S.
She had been born in 1922 in Leipzig, Germany. She came to the work camp in 1944 and left a year later as the war ended, the site abandoned by fleeing Nazis. She married Fred William Rinkel, a German Jewish refugee from the war. In 1959, not yet 40, she applied for a U.S. visa but discreetly failed to include on the form her time at Ravensbruck.
Eventually, the Justice Department traced her to San Francisco. 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.
