[Jim O]

Originally Posted by Klaus

I wonder what will happen to her in Germany. Nothing so far. To marry a jew after you've been a guard in a concentration camp... You need some balls to do so.

From SPIEGEL ONLINE:

...German authorities said she would probably not go to jail. "We will not be pursuing her case," Kurt Schrimm, chief of the German bureau that investigates former Nazis, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "For us there is one crime that is important, and that is murder. There is no evidence that she committed murder."

Still, Rinkel never mentioned her job to her husband Fred, a German Jew she married in 1962, although he'd lost his parents in the Holocaust. "You don't talk about things like that, never," she told the San Francisco Chronicle. "That is the past."...


..."She was trying to atone for actions," Rinkel's lawyer in San Francisco, Alison Dixon, told The Los Angeles Times. "She married a Jewish man and she gave to Jewish charities."

She's described as a modest, sweet, private woman who was hoping to live down her past.

She buried her husband in a Jewish cemetery south of San Francisco in a double grave, with a Star of David above both their names. Her plans to be buried with him have been abandoned, and she just hopes to resume a quiet life with her sister.

There's still a slim chance of legal trouble in Germany, though. Kurt Schrimm said the Central Office has passed on her file to German public prosecutors who could open a legal case, but observers think Rinkel was too low in the Nazi hierarchy for aggressive prosecution.

"Clearly it's a complex story," said Mark Weitzman, Director of the Task Force Against Hate at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in New York. "Essentially it's our position that anyone involved in Nazi atrocities should be brought to justice. Could there be extenuating circumstances that may mitigate punishment? I think that can be considered," he said. "But it doesn't change what she did."