Hermine Braunsteiner

Hermine Braunsteiner
Nickname	Mare of Majdanek
Born	July 16, 1919(1919-07-16) Vienna, Austria
Died	April 19, 1999(1999-04-19) (aged 79) Bochum, Germany
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service/branch	Schutzstaffel women's auxiliary
Years of service	1939-1945
Rank	SS Helferin
Awards	Kriegsverdienstkreuz 2. Klasse, 1943
Other work	Hotel and restaurant worker housewife

Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan (July 16, 1919 – April 19, 1999) was a female camp guard and the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States.

Early life

She was born in Vienna, the youngest child in a strictly observant Roman Catholic working class family. Her father Friedrich Braunsteiner was a chauffeur for a brewery and/or a butcher. Hermine lacked the means to fulfill her aspiration to become a nurse, and worked as a maid. From 1937 to 1938 she worked in England for an American engineer's household.

World War II and after

Heinkel

In 1938 the Anschluss made her a German citizen, and she returned to Vienna. Late that year she moved and found work at the Heinkel aircraft works in Berlin.

Ravensbrück

At the urging of her landlord, she applied for a better paying job with better working conditions, supervising prisoners, quadrupling her income in time. She began her training on August 15, 1939, as an Aufseherin under Maria Mandel at Ravensbrück concentration camp. After some years a disagreement with Mandel led Braunsteiner to request a transfer.

Majdanek

On October 16, 1942, she took up her duties in the apparel factory at Majdanek, located near Lublin, Poland. It was both a labour camp (Arbeitslager) and an extermination camp (Vernichtungslager). She was promoted to assistant wardress in January 1943 under Oberaufseherin Elsa Erich along with five other women.^{[citation needed]}

Her abuses took many forms in the camp. She involved herself in "selections" of women and children to be sent to the gas chambers and whipped several women to death. Working alongside other female guards such as Elsa Ehrich, Hildegard Lächert, Marta Ulrich, Alice Orlowski, Charlotte Karla Mayer-Woellert, Erna Wallisch and Elisabeth Knoblich, Braunsteiner was infamous for her wild rages and tantrums. According to one witness at her later trial in Dusseldorf, she "seized children by their hair and threw them on trucks heading to the gas chambers”. Other survivors testied how she killed women by stomping on them with her steel-studded jackboots, earning her the nickname "The Stomping Mare". (In Polish "Kobyła", in German "Stute von Majdanek".)

She received the War Merit Cross, 2nd class, in 1943, for her work.

Ravensbrück again

In January 1944, Hermine was ordered back to Ravensbrück as Majdanek began evacuations. There she was promoted to supervising wardress at the Genthin subcamp of Ravensbrück, located outside Berlin. Witnesses say that she abused many of the prisoners with a special whip she carried.^{[citation needed]}

Post war Austria

On May 7, 1945, Hermine Braunsteiner fled the camp ahead of the Soviet Red Army. She then returned to Vienna, but soon left, complaining that there was not enough food there.^{[citation needed]}

The Austrian police arrested her and turned her over to the British military occupation authorities; she remained incarcerated from May 6, 1946, until April 18, 1947. A court in Graz, Austria convicted her of torture, maltreatment of prisoners and crimes against humanity and against human dignity at Ravensbrück (not Majdanek), then sentenced her to serve three years, beginning April 7, 1948; she was released early in April 1950. An Austrian civil court subsequently granted her amnesty from further prosecution there. She worked at low level jobs in hotels and restaurants until emigrating.

Emigration and marriage

Russell Ryan, an American, met her on his vacation in Austria. They married in October 1958, after they had emigrated to Nova Scotia, Canada. She entered the United States in April 1959, becoming a United States citizen on January 19, 1963. They lived in Maspeth, Queens, where she was known as a fastidious housewife and friendly neighbor.

Discovery

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal had followed her trail from a tip in Tel Aviv to Vienna to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then, via Toronto, to Queens. In 1964 Wiesenthal alerted the New York Times that Braunsteiner might have married a man named Ryan and might live in the Maspeth area of the Borough of Queens in New York. They assigned Joseph Lelyveld, then a young reporter, to find "Mrs. Ryan." They first lived at 54-44 82nd St. in western Elmhurst and moved to 52-11 72nd St. in Maspeth. He found her at the second doorbell he rang, and later wrote that she greeted him at her front doorstep and said, "My God, I knew this would happen. You've come."

Braunsteiner Ryan stated that she had been at Maidanek only a year, eight months of which in the camp infirmary. "My wife, sir, wouldn't hurt a fly" said Ryan. "There's no more decent person on this earth. She told me this was a duty she had to perform. It was a conscriptive service." On August 22, 1968, United States authorities sought to revoke her citizenship because she had failed to disclose her convictions for war crimes; she was denaturalized in 1971 after entering into a consent judgment to avoid deportation.

Extradition

A prosecutor in Duesseldorf began investigating her wartime behavior, and in 1973 the German government requested her extradition, accusing her of joint responsibility in the death of 200,000 people.

The United States court denied procedural claims that her denaturalization had been invalid (U.S citizens could not be extradited to Germany), and that the charges alleged political offenses committed by a non-German outside West Germany. Later it rejected claims of lack of probable cause and double jeopardy. During the next year she sat with her husband in United States district court in Queens, hearing survivors' testimony against the former SS guard. They described whippings and fatal beatings. Rachel Berger, alone among the witnesses, testified she would celebrate retribution against the former vice-commandant of the women's camp at Majdanek.

The judge certified her extradition to the Secretary of State on May 1, 1973, and on August 7, 1973, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan became the first Nazi war criminal extradited from the United States to Germany.

Return to Germany

She was remanded in Düsseldorf in 1973, until her husband posted bail. The German court rejected Mrs. Ryan's arguments that it lacked jurisdiction, because she was not a German national but Austrian, and that the offenses alleged had occurred outside Germany. It ruled she had been a German citizen at the time, and more importantly had been a German government official acting in the name of the German Reich.

She stood trial in West Germany with 15 other former SS men and women from Majdanek. One of the witnesses against Hermine testified that she "seized children by their hair and threw them on trucks heading to the gas chambers." Others spoke of vicious beatings. One witness told of Hermine and the steel-studded jackboots with which she dealt blows to inmates.

The third Majdanek trial (Majdanek-Prozess in German) was held in Düsseldorf. It began on November 26, 1975, and lasted 474 sessions, Germany's longest and most expensive trial. All the defendants, including Ryan and Hermann Hackmann, had been SS guards at Majdanek. The court found insufficient evidence on six counts of the indictment and convicted her on three: murder of 80 people; abetting the murder of 102 children; and collaborating in the murder of 1000. On June 30, 1981, the court imposed a life sentence, a more severe punishment than those meted out to her co-defendants.

Complications of diabetes, including a leg amputation, led to her release from Mülheimer women's prison in 1996. Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan died on April 19, 1999, aged 79, in Bochum, Germany.

Aftermath

After the publicity surrounding Mrs. Ryan's extradition, the United States government established (1979) a U.S. DOJ Office of Special Investigations to seek out war criminals to denaturalize or deport. It took jurisdiction previously held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.^{[citation needed]}

Further reading

• Ashman, Charles R.; Robert J. Wagman (1988). The Nazi Hunters. New York: Pharos Books. pp. 190–1, 290, 305. ISBN 0886873576. http://lccn.loc.gov/88060373. 
• Bloch, Anne L.; Patricia Lowe Fox, Frances McClernan, Gitel Poznanski, Max Radin, Ursula Wasserman. The Black Book: the Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People. New York: Duell Sloan & Pearce/Jewish Black Book Committee 1946. http://lccn.loc.gov/46003917.  May identify her as Hermine Braunstein.
• Blum, Howard (1977). Wanted! : The search for Nazis in America. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company. pp. 22–9, 269–70. ISBN 0812906071. http://lccn.loc.gov/76009689. 
• Brown, Daniel Patrick (2002). The Camp Women: The Female Auxiliaries Who Assisted the SS in Running the Nazi Concentration Camp System. Atglen, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing. ISBN 0-7643-1444-0. http://lccn.loc.gov/2001090817. Retrieved 2008-10-15. 
• Lelyveld, Joseph (2005). Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374225902. 
• Miles, Rosalind; Robin Cross (February 2008). Hell Hath No Fury: True Stories of Women at War from Antiquity to Iraq. New York: Three Rivers Press. ISBN 9780307346377. http://lccn.loc.gov/2007027905. 
• Milton, Sybil (1984). "Women and the Holocaust". In Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan. When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. New York: Monthly Review Press. pp. 308–10. ISBN 0853456429. http://lccn.loc.gov/84018969. Retrieved 2008-10-15. 
• James W. Moeller (1985). "United States Treatment of Alleged Nazi War Criminals: International Law, Immigration Law, and the Need for International Cooperation". Virginia Journal of International Law 25: p. 812. 
• Ryan, Allan A., Jr. (1984). Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. pp. 46–52. ISBN 0151758239. http://lccn.loc.gov/84006540. .
• Wiesenthal, Simon (1989). Justice Not Vengeance. translated from the German by Ewald Osers. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 0297796836. http://lccn.loc.gov/91103439. 
• Wolff, Lynn L. The Mare of Majdanek: Female Concentration Camp Guards in History and Fiction. University of Wisconsin. B.A., Senior thesis with honors 2001.
• United States v. Ryan, 360 F. Supp. 265, 266 (E.D.N.Y. 1973).
• Ryan v. United States, 360 F. Supp. 264 (E.D.N.Y. 1973), No. 73-C-439, 24 Apr. 1973; United States v. Ryan, 360 F. Supp. 265 (E.D.N.Y. 1973), No. 68-C- 848, 24 Apr. 1973.
• In re the Extradition of Ryan, 360 F. Supp. 270 (E.D.N.Y. 1973), No. 73-C-391 (1 May 1973).
• Staatsanwaltschaft Köln, Anklageschrift, 130 (24) Js 200/62 (Z), pp. 163, 281; Landgericht Düsseldorf, Urteil gg. Hermann Hackmarm u.A., 8 Ks 1/75, 30 June 1981, pp. 688–89.
• Staatsanwaltschaft Köln, Anklageschrift gg. Hermann Hackmarm u.A., 130 (24) Js 200/62 (Z), 15 Nov. 1974, pp. 157–63.
• Landgericht Düsseldorf, Urteil, 8 Ks 1/75, 30 June 1981, pp. 683–86.
• Landgericht Düsseldorf, Urteil, 8 Ks 1/75, 30 June 1981 (2 vols.).