Former Nazis paid $20.2m in benefits

Elfriede Rinkel's past as a Nazi concentration camp guard didn't keep her from collecting nearly $120,000 in US Social Security benefits.

Rinkel admitted to being stationed at the Ravensbrueck camp during World War II, where she worked with an attack dog trained by the SS, according to US Justice Department records. She immigrated to California and married a German-born Jew whose parents had been killed in the Holocaust.

She agreed to leave the US in 2006 and remains the only woman the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit has ever initiated deportation proceedings against. Yet after Rinkel departed, the US Social Security Administration kept paying her widow benefits, which began after her husband died, because there was no legal basis for stopping them until late last year.