For Elfriede Rinkel, the small German town of Willich, near Düsseldorf, should
have been a perfect place to hide. The streets are peopled by stooped
figures, each with a stick or a Zimmer frame. Old people’s homes are
numerous, all kitted out with secure-entry systems and potted plants in the
foyer, and with concierges.
Rinkel was unmasked in San Francisco last September as a former
concentration-camp guard at Ravensbrück, the Nazis’ only camp exclusively
for women. She was deported to Germany. Then, after shaking off the world’s
media by claiming she was “in Switzerland”, she went to ground here in
Willich.
But at one small hotel in the Schiefbahn suburb, rumours soon spread about the
rude behaviour of a woman who had moved into the Senioren Residenz in
Linselles Strasse – the most exclusive old people’s home in town. And, sure
enough, outside that same “senior residence” there was a shiny brass plaque
with “Elfriede Rinkel” emblazoned proudly on it.
But despite the plaque, Rinkel, it appeared, was still trying to hide. An
embarrassed concierge told me, while showing new clients around, that Frau
Rinkel was “certainly not available”, and refused to comment further.
Reached at last on the telephone, Rinkel herself simply barked in guttural
German-accented English, “Forget it. There is nothing to say. Forget it,”
and slammed down the phone.
But there is a great deal to be said about Elfriede Rinkel. It was Eli
Rosenbaum who first climbed the stairs of a San Francisco apartment block to
knock on Rinkel’s door. Rosenbaum, America’s most tenacious Nazi hunter,
likes to be there in person for an arrest. And he particularly wanted to see
for himself how the 84-year-old Elfriede would react when he announced that
her secret was out.
Rinkel is the 133rd Nazi Rosenbaum has unmasked living on American soil since
the Office of Special Investigations was set up to track down Nazi war
criminals in 1979. But her case is unique, as she is the first woman against
whom legal action has been taken.
His investigations revealed that Rinkel had worked as a concentration-camp
guard and dog handler at Ravensbrück for the last nine months of the war,
when the worst atrocities were committed there. The exact death toll for
Ravensbrück is much disputed, but figures compiled by the British after the
war suggest that as many as 90,000 women, children and babies died there –
gassed, shot, beaten, starved or worked to death, or simply killed by
disease. All the women – mothers, partisans, peasants, Jews, common
criminals, lesbians, intellectuals – had been swept up by the Nazi war
machine as it moved across Europe. Even a handful of Britons died there,
including the agent Violette Szabo, who had been parachuted into occupied
France by the Special Operations Executive.
What made the camp even more disturbing was the fact that it was guarded by
women – and these women often committed the worst atrocities. As many as
3,500 German women, mostly under 30, passed through Ravensbrück as guards.
Elfriede Rinkel was just 22 when she took up her post as “Hundeführerin” –
or dog handler – there on June 15, 1944.
But for Eli Rosenbaum there was something else unique about the Rinkel case.
His investigation has also shown that Elfriede had married a Jew called Fred
Rinkel soon after she emigrated to the US in 1959. Fred was himself a Jewish
refugee from Germany, who had lost both parents in the Holocaust. Elfriede
and Fred apparently went on to live happily in San Francisco until his death
in 2004 – Elfriede even attending his synagogue from time to time.
Leaning on a cane, with plump cheeks and dyed red hair, Elfriede Rinkel
quickly ushered the dark-suited Rosenbaum indoors when she heard the knock.
“She did not seem terribly surprised that I had found her,” he says.
Nor was she surprised by what he had to say, admitting without demur that she
was indeed Elfriede Huth (her maiden name, which was on the Ravensbrück SS
record card recently obtained by Rosenbaum). Seeing that the game was up,
she readily admitted to him that she had failed to declare the nature of her
wartime work when she arrived in the US in 1959.
“When I said she faced deportation, she simply said that she would not contest
it,” says Rosenbaum. On the subject of Ravensbrück itself, however, she
“showed absolutely no remorse” and said she had “done nothing wrong”.
The old lady was, however, only too eager to manipulate the special prosecutor
and change the subject, recalls Rosenbaum. “She was particularly keen I
understand she had married a Jew. And the way she did this was, she walked
across the room and she came back with a photograph of her husband’s
tombstone at the Jewish cemetery near San Francisco. It showed both her name
and his on the tombstone with a Star of David above. She said her wish had
been to be buried next to him.” Rosenbaum asked her whether she had
converted to Judaism. “No,” she replied. She simply wished to lie alongside
her husband when she died. If she were to be deported, she would still like
to request that her coffin be brought back to the US and to the Jewish
cemetery for burial. And had she told her late husband what she did during
the war? She had tried to, she claimed. “He wasn’t interested.” Rosenbaum
took this for another lie and formed the view that Fred had just been part
of her cover.
On August 31, 2006, Eli Rosenbaum’s officials ensured that Elfriede Rinkel
flew to Germany, with orders never to come back.
Her brother, Kurt, who lived in nearby Berkeley, California, saw her off, but
even he didn’t know about her past until he read about it in the San
Francisco Chronicle over the following days. In one article, Rinkel herself
gave a brief statement saying that she “had no choice” about working at
Ravensbrück, and “knew nothing” about the atrocities.
For many of California’s German Jews, the news that a Nazi had been living in
their midst – married to one of theirs – was shattering. “She was so small
and quiet – you would never imagine she could have done things like
that,” says Gisela Plesin, a close friend of Fred’s sister-in-law, Eli
Rinkel, who also lived in San Francisco.
“What shocked me was that a woman like this had quietly crept into our
family,” said another relative of Rinkel, Bodo Cohnhagen.
“None of us suspected. And Fred would have fallen off his chair and died of a
heart attack if he had known,” says Gisela. “Looking back, though, it
explains their strange behaviour. You see, after they were married they
behaved somehow like they were in hiding – Elfriede would have nothing
to do with us on Fred’s side of the family. Fred was certainly never allowed
out without her. It was as if she had imprisoned him.
“I guess in retrospect it’s obvious that she was afraid to mix with us in case
she bumped into someone from her past. Perhaps we’d ask her questions and
her story would come out. You know, despite it all, they did seem fond of
each other – 42 years is a long time to stay together.”
Fred (then Fritz) Rinkel and Lina Elfriede Huth were both born in Germany in
the early 1920s – she in Leipzig, he in Berlin – but their paths were hardly
likely to have crossed in those early days.
Between the wars, Fritz’s parents, Adolf and Franziska, lived near the Berlin
Tiergarten and ran a prosperous manufacturing business. With Hitler’s rise
to power in 1933, the family lost the business, and by 1938 all four sons
were trying to flee Germany. US quotas for Jews barred them from America,
but they found places on a steamer to Shanghai. Their parents stayed behind
– for reasons never explained by the sons.
Not long after the outbreak of war in 1939, Adolph and Franziska were driven
out of their Berlin home into holding camps in Berlin, from where trains
were already leaving for the Nazi camps, including Ravensbrück. In 1942 they
were moved to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where Adolf died just three
months later. Franziska was taken to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas
chambers in 1944.
When war broke out, Elfriede was living in Leipzig with her parents and
younger brother, Kurt, in a modest flat at 36 Holzhäuser Strasse. Her
father, Christian Huth, was a carpenter.
Though allied bombs destroyed much of Leipzig, Elfriede’s home still stands
today, and Leonora Zimmerman, 88, a friend and neighbour of hers before the
war, can recall the young Elfriede as “a pleasant girl – not remarkable in
any way, but always friendly.
“She was chubby, with blonde-reddish hair – and she used to stop at our flat
to pass the time of day on her way out to work. She always asked if we
needed anything from the shops. They were a very nice family – quite hard
up. And Elfriede certainly had to go out and get a job.”
Among the main employers in Leipzig were the Jewish fur traders, whose
bustling market was renowned across Germany, so Elfriede earned money sewing
fur. Leonora often saw her sitting on a bench at her work in the small
courtyard outside her flat. But by 1939 the Jewish furriers had been banned
from trading and moved into ghettos. With its high unemployment rate,
Leipzig had proved a stronghold for Hitler’s National Socialists. When, in
1942, Leipzig Jews were frogmarched through the streets and out to the death
camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz, the rest of the inhabitants looked on. “We
all saw them leaving, and of course Elfriede would have seen them go too. We
didn’t know where they were going, but we had our suspicions,” says Leonora.
By the middle of the war, Elfriede’s brother was serving with the regular
German army in North Africa, but back home, with the Jewish fur trade gone,
Elfriede was out of work and her father’s business was struggling.
Leipzig had strong links with Ravensbrück concentration camp, which was
supplying women as slave labourers to work in the city’s munitions
factories. It is probable that Elfriede’s next job was as a supervisor in
one of these Leipzig munitions works, watching over the Ravensbrück slave
labourers. Housed in overcrowded barracks on the city’s edge and fed on
near-starvation rations, the prisoners worked to the point of exhaustion –
and often death.
The SS command at Ravensbrück would order German women to take work as
concentration guards. But Elfriede actually volunteered for the work at
Ravensbrück, after hearing about the camp from a recruiter.
Given what Elfriede had now seen of the treatment of camp prisoners in
Leipzig, and of the fate of the city’s Jews, it was clearly nonsense to say
she knew nothing of what a camp guard’s work would involve. And she’d have
been in no doubt that Ravensbrück was a concentration camp, as she received
a letter from the camp commandant, prior to arrival, confirming that she
would be working as a guard in such a camp.
But like the other “unremarkable” women who took jobs as guards at
Ravensbrück, Elfriede Rinkel had her own priorities. For such young women, a
post as an SS camp guard meant better pay, social advancement and even a
chance to find a husband among the male camp staff.
On arriving at Ravensbrück in June 1944, Elfriede Rinkel was no doubt
pleasantly surprised. The camp was built on the edge of the idyllic Schwedt
Lake in forests near the town of Fürstenberg, about 50 miles northeast of
Berlin.
The “Aufseherinnen” – women guards – were housed in pretty pitched-roof villas
just outside the main camp walls overlooking the lake. Mostly women of
similar backgrounds and interests – former domestic servants, prison warders
or factory workers – they would make amiable companions for Elfriede.
Several of the former women guards kept photographs and diaries of their time
at Ravensbrück, containing pictures of their “luxurious” apartment
furnishings, noting their pretty bedroom curtains and spacious wardrobes. Or
they snapped their female colleagues rowing on the Schwedt, or picnicking
with SS male officers at weekends. Evidently proud of their positions at the
camp, the women kept pictures of themselves in their smart grey uniforms –
the dog handlers would pose with their german shepherd dogs. These albums
show the women had no doubts about the respectability of their work or the
legality of the concentration camp.
In their memoirs, camp survivors often recall the “attractiveness” of the
Ravensbrück guards. Dorothea Binz, the chief guard during Rinkel’s time, was
particularly noted for her “beauty” and for her perfectly bobbed blonde
hair. But she is also scored into prisoners’ memories as a sadist who could
not conceal her pleasure as she beat inmates to near death, sometimes
watching others take the whip as she stood with her lover, the SS officer
Edmund Brauning.
Binz was a forester’s daughter whose family lived near the camp in the village
of Alt Globsow, but those who knew her as a young girl remember nothing
remarkable about her and certainly no cruelty in her character.
On arrival, Elfriede would have been briefed by Binz and encouraged to follow
her lead. Several of Binz’s closest colleagues had been handpicked for top
female jobs at Auschwitz and Majdanek. The so-called “beautiful beast” Irma
Grese, another local Fürstenberg girl, trained at Ravensbrück before moving
on to run the women’s camp at Belsen.
As a dog handler, Elfriede was assigned a german shepherd dog called Albert,
claiming after her deportation that her task had simply been to walk
alongside women sent out of the camp in work teams. But the camp record and
prisoners’ memoirs tell a different story.
On arrival it was these “raven women” with their snarling attack dogs who met
the new prisoners as they spilt out of cattle trucks at Fürstenberg station
to a cacophony of barking and female cries of “Achtung, achtung”. Any who
fell were set upon by the dogs. And the sinister howling of the dogs
accompanied each dawn roll call, when prisoners stood petrified as dogs
encircled those who fainted. One of the camp’s SS doctors, Gerhard
Schliedausky, gave evidence after the war about the treatment of dog bites
in the camp hospital. “These bites were more frequent in the spring when the
dogs were in season and more agitated.
“I remember cases of very serious bites of the chest, legs and arms,” he said.
He also recalled one dog called Prince, which was the most feared in the
camp. A French prisoner-doctor talked of women bleeding to death from dog
bites.
It was, in fact, Himmler’s own idea to “arm” women with dogs instead of guns
because the dogs would frighten women more than men.
A woman with a dog was worth two guards. As allied air attacks over
Fürstenberg increased in 1943, Himmler feared uprisings in the camp, and
ordered that the dogs be used “like wild beasts” to suppress any sign of
revolt and “trained to savage to death everyone except their handler”.
“A vision of hell” was how the Norwegian prisoner Sylvia Salvesen described
her first sight of the camp’s inmates in 1942. “I saw before me for the
first time human beings, but I could not judge if they were men or women.
Their hair was shaved and they were thin, unhappy and filthy… they had what
I would call ‘dead eyes’.”
During the time Elfriede worked at the camp, conditions were far worse, as
Ravensbrück was swollen by the number of prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz
and other eastern camps in the path of the advancing Russians. The new arrivals
appeared in worse condition than the Ravensbrück prisoners. One survivor
wrote that they were “emaciated cattle”, so desperate that they “licked
spilt soup off the dusty floors”.
In the summer of 1944 thousands of women captured in the Warsaw Uprising, many
of them pregnant, were brought to Ravensbrück. The barracks were so
overcrowded that most of these women were forced to lie on straw in stifling
heat in a makeshift tent, surrounded by pits overflowing with effluent. Many
died of disease and starvation within weeks of arrival.
In the main camp, other women now slept 250 to a hut and three to a mattress,
feeding on watery soup and rising for roll calls at 4am before marching to
backbreaking slave labour, while forced to sing German songs. Barrows
circulated, collecting corpses for the crematorium. By winter, the corpses
of babies born to the women from Warsaw were stored in a cellar under the
“hospital” before being burnt. Their despairing mothers had become too
emaciated to feed them and, despite pleas from other prisoners, the staff
had let them die.
As the Red Army approached Ravensbrück, Himmler gave the order that the
killing was not happening fast enough, and a gas chamber was built in which
1,700 women and children were gassed in the single month of November 1944.
Between January and April 1945 the killings were accelerated, and 6,993
women and children – mostly Jews – were gassed there.
Elfriede claimed she knew nothing of these killings. Yet how could she not
have seen and heard the horror all around her?
Her fellow guards remarked after the war that they could see the crematorium
flames through their bedroom curtains. The residents of Fürstenberg
complained that the water in the lake was clogged with ash.
In April 1945, with the Red Army just a few miles away, prisoners were rounded
up and marched out of the camp. Expecting to be driven into the Baltic, or
simply shot, the women prisoners then suddenly found they were free and that
their guards – fearing rape and murder at the hands of the Russians – had
run away.
When the Red Army swept through Fürstenberg, scores of local Germans were
raped, and at Alt Globsow, the home of Dorothea Binz, the wife of one senior
Nazi official was found hanged, her body impaled on a stick.
Binz herself, last seen leaving Ravensbrück on a bicycle, had fled west, and
was eventually tracked down by British investigators. Tried at the
British-run Ravensbrück war-crimes trial held in Hamburg in 1946, she, along
with 11 other Ravensbrück women guards and male officers, was sentenced to
death and hanged.
Of the 3,500 Ravensbrück women guards, however, only about 200 ever faced any
kind of trial after the war. The rest, like Elfriede Rinkel, simply
disappeared.
Elfriede almost certainly fled to her home city of Leipzig. Liberated by the
Americans, and now badly bombed, it was as good a place as any to go to
ground. The city’s state archives record that Elfriede Huth was the last
resident in the city in 1948. By this time the allied hunt for Nazi war
criminals had largely been called off, which is why so many are left at
large today for Eli Rosenbaum to hunt down.
In 1948, while Elfriede was still in hiding in Leipzig, Fritz Rinkel and his
three brothers left Shanghai for the US. Jews immigrating to the US from the
East arrived first on the California coast, which was where many, including
all four Rinkel brothers, chose to stay. By 1948 there was already a
thriving German community there.
Fritz changed his name to Fred and found work as a waiter in a San Francisco
cafe, where he belted out operatic arias. He became a familiar sight at the
city’s opera house, where he sported a tuxedo and cummerbund, and was often
accompanied by his sister-in-law Eli Rinkel, the wife of his brother Harry
(formerly Heinrich), and her best friend, Gisela Plesin. A humorous
character, well known on the Powell Street cable car, Fred was nicknamed
Einstein because of his enormous bushy moustache.
Fred appeared in no hurry to get married in these years and enjoyed his
bachelor social life. But in the early 1960s he met the redheaded Elfriede
Huth at a German club dance. They were married in 1963.
Elfriede had emigrated from Germany to the US in 1959. By this time she and
her sister were living near Düsseldorf, where Elfriede was again working as
a seamstress. Why Rinkel chose to leave Germany at this time she has not
revealed, but US immigration rules were notoriously slack during these
post-war years, and scores of former Nazis gained entry at this time.
Elfriede was sponsored on her immigration application by her brother, Kurt,
now living in Berkeley, California. Taken prisoner by the Americans during
the war, Kurt had been offered the chance to settle in the United States and
had been living there legally. He did not know that his sister lied on her
form about her concentration-camp work because she hadn’t told him.
Gisela Plesin recalls how Harry and Eli Rinkel hosted Fred and Elfriede’s
wedding in their house. “Eli laid on a lovely wedding. But then she and
Harry were never invited back to their home, and Elfriede refused all their
further invitations. So Eli took against Elfriede. Didn’t like her at all.
Even if they did meet, Eli complained that Elfriede would act kind of dumb.
And she hung onto Fred so close.”
In San Francisco, Elfriede soon found work, again as a seamstress with the fur
trade, this time making mink coats for California’s wealthy. The couple were
not badly off. Fred and his brothers had secured compensation from Germany
for the loss of their parents in the Holocaust, as well as a small pension.
Some of the Rinkels’ German relatives, visiting Harry and Eli in the 1990s,
were also struck by the aloofness of Fred and Elfriede.
“But now it all makes sense,” says Monica Cohnhagen. “The German Jewish crowd
in San Francisco used to argue all the time. They would score points off
each other about who left Germany earlier and who left later and who knew
what about what had happened. If Elfriede had been there, they would have
brought her into the argument and she wouldn’t have known what to say.”
And for his part, Fred was also loath to talk about the war years, perhaps
because it brought back memories of his parents’ fate and perhaps because of
guilt at having left them behind.
It wasn’t only the family who noticed how “close” the couple were. Neighbours
noticed them always arm in arm. They also heard them singing German songs
together and dancing across the living-room floor.
Of all Fred’s family, it seems that only his older brother Gary (formerly
Gerhardt) had any real suspicions about Elfriede’s background. “It was like
this,” explains Gary’s wife, Genoveva Rinkel: “Every time he had Freddie on
the phone, Freddie would suddenly say, ‘I need to hang up – my wife is
coming.’ Gary thought it was as if he was scared of her and got to thinking
there was something strange about her.
“What Gary couldn’t understand was why Elfriede had not got US citizenship
like the rest of us. He thought she must have had something to do with the
Nazis. When he and Fred used to argue, Gary would say ‘and your wife is a
Nazi’. Then Freddie wouldn’t speak for months.”
Did Genoveva think that Freddie suspected as much? “I don’t know. She must
have given him some story, but why didn’t he ask her outright about her
past? That’s what we all want to know.”
In the 1980s, Rosenbaum’s Office of Special Investigations unmasked a series
of important Nazi war criminals living in the US, including two found living
not far from Rinkel in California. Her own fears that she too would soon be
traced must have been intense.
And following Fred’s death in 2004, Rinkel must have felt even more
vulnerable. With further publicity about Rosenbaum’s activities, she may
have suspected that he would soon be knocking on her door.
Elfriede Rinkel will certainly not be returning, even in her coffin, to
America, if Rosenbaum has anything to do with it, but he accepts that the
law is on her side. “US immigration laws only apply to living people. But he
adds: “I think it just a little naive of her to think a Jewish cemetery
would have her now.”
Rinkel herself appears to have realised as much. She replaced the tombstone on
her husband’s grave before she finally left the US. The new stone shows only
the name Fred Rinkel beneath the Star of David.
Back in Germany, Elfriede hopes to be left in peace. The German prosecutors
say that, having reviewed Rinkel’s case, they can find no evidence showing
that she committed a crime. And witnesses who might be able to describe
Rinkel’s role at the concentration camp would be very hard to find today.
And Elfriede Rinkel’s final comment on the whole affair came in that brief
phone call: “Forget it. There is nothing to say. Forget it!”
Sarah Helm is the author of A Life in Secrets, the Story of Vera Atkins and
the Lost Agents of SOE (Little, Brown, £8.50)
