An elderly San Francisco woman was deported to Germany this month after admitting she was a guard in a Nazi-operated concentration camp in the Third Reich’s waning days, federal officials said Tuesday.
But although Elfriede Lina Rinkel, 84, now admits her terrible past, shocked Berkeley relatives said Tuesday she had hid her secret for more than 60 years even from them and apparently from her late husband — a German Jew who’d fled the Holocaust himself.
Rinkel’s brother and sister-in-law, longtime Berkeley residents who asked that their names not be published, said they just learned the truth Tuesday when reporters called them for comment.
“It knocked us off our feet,” the sister-in-law said. “We have many, many Jewish friends who live in the Oakland/Berkeley area and this would be quite shocking to them as it was to us.”
Rinkel — charged under a federal law requiring removal of aliens who took part in acts of Nazi-sponsored persecution — in June signed a settlement agreement with the government admitting that from June 1944 to April 1945 she was a guard at the Ravensbruck camp, built near Furstenburg, Germany almost exclusively for female prisoners.
Documents released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations say she used a trained SS guard dog at the camp. The OSI 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.
Ravensbruck’s construction began in late 1938, and the camp was liberated by the Russian Army on April 30, 1945, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In the interim, an estimated 130,000 women and children were imprisoned there, of whom an estimated 90,000 died by starvation, execution, weakness or medical experimentation. The inmates came mostly from Poland and the occupied Soviet territories; almost 15 percent were Jewish.
Rinkel’s husband, Fred William Rinkel, 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 sister-in-law — who said her husband didn’t know of his sister’s wartime activity, as he served in the German Army and was captured by U.S. troops in North Africa — said Fred Rinkel almost certainly didn’t know, either.
“He had to leave Germany during all that terrible stuff that happened there and had to relocate in Shanghai, a lot of the Jewish Germans went to Shanghai,” she said, adding he was from a prominent Berlin family of doctors and lawyers, and had been training to become an opera singer before being forced to flee his homeland. He owned a San Francisco tie shop.
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 Ravensbruck.
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 her husband had sponsored their sibling’s immigration, said Tuesday Elfriede Rinkel met Fred Rinkel decades ago at a German-American Club in San Francisco.
The Justice Department wouldn’t discuss what Fred Rinkel knew or didn’t know. “OSI is obviously aware of the background information on Fred Rinkel,” spokeswoman Jaclyn Lesch said Tuesday. “We really can’t speak beyond that… We’re unable to speak to that subject.”
The San Francisco attorney who represented Elfriede Rinkel in the deportation proceedings didn’t return a call Tuesday.
The SS, or Schutzstaffel — German for “protective squadron” — was a large, elite security and military arm of the Nazi party; one of its duties was operating concentration camps.
“Thousands of innocent women were brutalized and murdered at Ravensbruck through the active participation of Elfriede Rinkel and other guards, whose principal function was to prevent prisoners from escaping the abominable conditions inside the camp,” OSI director Eli Rosenbaum said in a news release issued Tuesday. “Her presence in the United States was an affront to surviving Holocaust victims who have made new homes in this country.”
Her address as of this April was an apartment building on Bush Street at Powell, two blocks up Nob Hill from Union Square.
“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,” the sister-in-law said. “We thought she was going because her situation in her apartment had deteriorated.”
Elfriede Rinkel had bad arthritis, she explained, and her apartment building’s elevator was often out of service. “She said she just wanted to go back to Germany, and because she told us that, we believed her.”
During a sworn interview last November, it says, Rinkel admitted she’d concealed her time at Ravensbruck for fear her application would be rejected. The settlement agreement she signed in June says she admits her work as a Ravensbruck guard, and that it’s a deportable offense; she agreed to give up her green card, leave the country and never return, although after death her remains can be brought back here for burial.
The government agreed not to publicize the case until after she left the country, and not to assert that she was a Nazi Party member; the Justice Department reported Tuesday she returned to Germany this month.
Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, called the case’s facts “chilling, compelling, and in some ways hard to fathom. But such is the nature of individuals linked to the Holocaust; so much of what happened is difficult but important to examine, even decades after humanity endured this nightmare.”
Lantos applauded the German and U.S. governments for their efforts. “This process comes years too late for many who deserved to see their day in court, but at least it is now close at hand.”
Contact Josh Richman at jrichman@angnewspapers.com.
