For more than 60 years Elfriede Lina Rinkel hid a terrible secret. To her family, friends and Jewish husband Fred, Mrs Rinkel was one of many Germans who had fled to the US after the Second World War seeking a better life.

But this week the 84-year-old’s extraordinary past caught up with her. American officials said Mrs Rinkel had been deported from her San Francisco home to Germany after US investigators discovered she had worked as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp.

Mrs Rinkel’s shocked relatives, who did not want to be identified, said they had no idea about her wartime activities. She had concealed her past for half a century not only from them but from her husband — a German Jew who fled the Holocaust. He died two years ago and almost certainly knew nothing of the truth, they said.

“It knocked us off our feet,” Mrs Rinkel’s sister-in-law said. “We have many Jewish friends. This would be quite shocking for them as it was to us.”

According to the US Justice Department, Mrs Rinkel worked at Ravensbruck concentration camp, north of Berlin, from June 1944 to April 1945.

Documents released by the department’s office of special investigations, set up to track down fugitive Nazis, include her SS service card and bank records.

Ravensbruck, completed in 1939 by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, was built almost exclusively for female prisoners. Within a few years it had evolved into a brutal slave labour camp where “undesirable” women — first German opponents of the Nazi regime, prostitutes and criminals, later Jews and Gypsies — were held, experimented on and killed.

More than 130,000 women passed through the camp, near the town of Furstenberg. Most came from Poland or the occupied Soviet Union. Only 40,000 survived.

Since Mrs Rinkel’s return to Germany this month, her whereabouts are unknown. Officials from Germany’s Nazi investigations unit said they would not try to arrest her since any crimes she might have committed would have “expired”.

TA