An 83-year-old German woman deported from the United States for concealing her Nazi past as a concentration camp guard is a war criminal and should be prosecuted, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said on Thursday.
Efraim Zuroff, head of the agency that tracks Nazis, said that U.S. authorities deserved praise for their diligence in finding Elfriede Lina Rinkel, who reportedly never told her late husband, a concentration camp survivor, of her past.
The U.S. Justice Department said this week Rinkel, who went to the United States in 1959, admitted she had served as a guard at the Ravensbruck concentration camp for women north of Berlin for the last 10 months of World War Two. She was deported to Germany earlier this month.
“She is a war criminal, she volunteered to work as a guard and walked around the camp watching over inmates with an attack dog,” Zuroff said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. “There’s no room for misplaced sympathy. I hope Germans will prosecute her.”
A spokeswoman for the German Justice Ministry in Berlin said they had not yet received any formal notification about Rinkel’s deportation. She added, however, the authorities would be investigating if there were any grounds for suspicion of crimes.
Rinkel has reportedly returned to stay with a sister in a town near Dusseldorf but local authorities said they have no records of her registering with police as required.
Married to Holocaust survivor
Kurt Schrimm, state prosecutor and head of the Ludwigsburg central agency for clarification of Nazi war crimes, said he was informed about Rinkel by U.S. authorities but the agency had no records of the woman, whose maiden name was Huth.
“We’ve searched our archives but don’t have anything on her,” said Schrimm, whose agency has investigated 100,000 cases and helped prosecutors in more than 6,000 cases.
Zuroff said that the Wiesenthal Center also did not have any archive material on Rinkel, who according to the charging document filed in U.S. immigration court in San Francisco used a trained attack dog to carry out her duties.
He said the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations deserved credit for finding Rinkel, who according to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper had never told her husband, a Jew who fled Nazi Germany, about her Nazi past.
Zuroff said the case was extraordinary for two reasons: Rinkel is a woman and married a concentration camp survivor.
“It doesn’t happen every day,” he said.
“But it is not uncommon that the closest relatives of people who served in Nazi units will not know what their loved ones did. This is the most difficult punishment for many — when their families learn what they really did during the war.”
