WASHINGTON — She lived alone in a tiny, top-floor apartment in one of the tougher sections of San Francisco. At 83, she was short and a bit stout. Diabetes took the sight in one of her eyes; arthritis left her leaning heavily on a cane. For long trips, she took a taxi.
Her husband had died. He was the love of her long life, a short, dapper man who had worked as a bartender and waiter at some of the city's larger hotels and was active in Jewish activities. They buried him in a Jewish cemetery outside the city.
He had been gone just a short while when two officials from the Justice Department in Washington knocked on her door. They confronted her with a terrible secret that all these years she had managed to keep from him.
In Germany during World War II, a much younger Elfriede Lina Rinkel, then single, a girl with blue eyes and striking red hair, had worked as an SS guard at one of the Nazi regime's infamous concentration camps. Called Ravensbruck, it was a slave labor prison for women, and during the year she worked there with a trained attack dog more than 10,000 women died.
Some succumbed to starvation and disease. Others were gassed. More died after cruel medical experiments. Some perished from sheer exhaustion.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that the woman with the pleasant smile and the German accent had been deported to Germany. She admitted that she had lied on her U.S. visa application.
Her lawyer, Alison Dixon, said she never told Fred, her husband. Not during their romance after the war, on their wedding night in Germany, or their voyage to a new life in America. Always, she kept quiet.
"He did not know," the lawyer said, "because all these years she was totally embarrassed."
Washington officials, however, said she coldly offered no expression of remorse about her past and did not fight the deportation.
The government caught up with a woman in the dusk of her life who expected perhaps soon to quietly join her husband in the Eternal Home Cemetery in Colma, south of the city. The double gravestone was already there, with the Star of David above their names.
Instead, she will be remembered as the only woman to be caught and deported in more than 100 completed cases of Nazi persecutors who lied their way into the United States. Matching Ravensbruck guard rosters with U.S. immigration documents -- about 70,000 names have been studied since the Office of Special Investigations opened in 1979 -- they hit on Elfriede Huth, her maiden name.
