San Francisco Women's Nazi Past

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Those who knew San Francisco's Elfriede Rinkel never found it remarkable that the German immigrant would marry a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, or attend synagogue with him, or plan to be buried next to him at a cemetery run by a Chevra Kadisha, a Jewish burial society that performs ritual purification.

On Tuesday, though, came a jarring twist: The U.S. Justice Department said the 84-year-old Rinkel had been deported to Germany, nearly half a century after she emigrated to the United States, because she had been a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in World War II where an estimated 90,000 people, many of them Jews, were exterminated.

"I think it may have been a type of atonement for her," her attorney, Alison Dixon, said of Elfriede's marriage to Fred Rinkel, who died two years ago. "My understanding is that she has also contributed to Jewish charities."

Elfriede Rinkel likes to live in towns with big activist government.