Little old lady hid a dark secret

LOS ANGELES - For 47 years, Elfriede Rinkel lived a seemingly blameless life in a rundown apartment in San Francisco.

She was a first-generation German immigrant whose husband, Fred, was a German Jew who had fled the Nazis.

Together, they mixed easily in Jewish circles, attended synagogue and donated to Jewish charities.

When Fred Rinkel died two years ago, his widow buried him in a Jewish cemetery, under a gravestone adorned with the Star of David - with space for her when she died.

But this week it turned out that the little old lady harboured a dark secret she successfully withheld from everybody - her husband, her family and the United States authorities.

For the last year of World War II, Rinkel - known by her maiden name Elfriede Huth - worked as a guard and dog handler in the Ravensbruck concentration camp.

Ravensbruck, in Germany's industrial northwest, was used as a slave labour facility for women. More than 130,000 women passed through during the six-year life of the camp, and more than two-thirds of them died - in gas chambers, in medical experiments, or from malnutrition and disease.

According to the US Justice Department, which has spent the past 27 years tracking down suspected former Nazi collaborators through its Office of Special Investigations, Rinkel's duties included using attack dogs to march inmates to their workplaces. About 10,000 women died while she was working at the camp.

"She was an integral part of the machinery of destruction and persecution at Ravensbruck," said the Office's chief, Eli Rosenbaum.

Rinkel's lawyer, Allison Dixon, painted a rather different picture, suggesting the young Huth responded to a job advertisement because she needed the money and only realised what she was getting into after it was too late to back out.

Dixon said her client, now 84, never joined the Nazi party and regretted what she had done. She regarded her subsequent life in the US as a form of atonement.

The Justice Department traced Rinkel by comparing the employee rosters at Ravensbruck and other camps with immigration records.

Rosenbaum was one of two officials who knocked on her door to confront her with the information. According to them, she offered no expression of remorse. Instead, she quietly went about the business of dismantling her American life and preparing for deportation to Germany.

She told her friends and family there was a problem with her apartment building that obliged her to leave.

She told the Jewish cemetery where her husband was buried that she wanted to sell back her own share of the burial plot.

She then flew to Germany where she is now living with a sister near the Ravensbruck camp. The German authorities have the option of trying her for war crimes, but it is more likely that her main punishment will be the embarrassment of having her past revealed.

- INDEPENDENT