San Francisco, CA - Woman Hid Nazi Past from Jewish Husband

San Francisco, CA - A San Francisco woman who was deported to Germany after admitting she was a concentration camp guard - as was reported on VOS IZ NEIAS - was married for decades to a Jewish man who had fled Nazi Germany.

Elfriede Rinkel, 83, served as a guard at Ravensbruck in Germany from June 1944 until the camp was abandoned at the end of World War II, U.S. Justice Dept said.
They said Rinkel was one of the guards who used attack dogs to force female inmates to perform slave labor at the camp, where an estimated 90,000 people were exterminated.
After the war, Rinkel moved to the U.S., where she met and married Fred Rinkel, a German Jew who had fled Berlin as the Nazi regime began its persecutions.

Elfriede Rinkel never told her husband, who died in 2004, about her past. She gave to Jewish charities and planned to be buried next to her husband in a Jewish cemetery, her lawyer said. Attorney Alison Dixon said Rinkel regretted her wartime actions but added, "I was informed that it was not completely voluntary on her part."