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Hermine Braunsteiner

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Hermine Braunsteiner
Nickname(s)Mare of Majdanek
AllegianceNazi Germany
Service/branchSchutzstaffel women's auxiliary
Years of service1939-1945
RankSS Helferin
AwardsKriegsverdienstkreuz 2. Klasse, 1943
Spouse(s)Russel Ryan
Other workHotel 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.[1][2]

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.[2][3][4][5]

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.[2][4]

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.[1][2][6] After some years a disagreement with Mandel led Braunsteiner to request a transfer.[2]

Majdanek

On October 16, 1942, she took up her duties in the apparel factory at Majdanek, located near Lublin, Poland. It was both an extermination camp and Arbeitslager.[1] She was promoted to assistant wardress in January 1943[1] 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 killed women by stamping on them, earning her the nickname "The Stamping Mare". (In Polish "Kobyła", in German "Stute von Majdanek".)[1][2][7]

She received the War Merit Cross, 2nd class, in 1943, for her work.[1]

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.[1] 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,[1] 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.[1][3][5][8] She worked at low level jobs in hotels and restaurants until emigrating.[2]

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.[3][4]

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.[3][9] In 1964 Wiesenthal alerted the New York Times that Braunsteiner might have married a man named Ryan and might live in Maspeth area, in the borough of Queens in New York City. 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."[5][8]

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."[8] 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.[2][3]

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.[1][2][10]

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.[2] 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.[11]

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.[2]

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.[1][2]

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.[4][12]

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.[1][13][14]

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.[1][4][12][15]

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]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m "Biographie: Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, 1919-1999" (in German). Deutsches Historisches Museum. Retrieved 2008-10-15. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help)
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Friedlander, Henry. "The Extradition of Nazi Criminals: Ryan, Artukovic, and Demjanjuk". Annual 4 Chapter 2 Part 1. Museum of Tolerance (Simon Wiesenthal Center Multimedia Learning Center). Retrieved 2008-10-14. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  3. ^ a b c d e Wistrich, Robert S. (2001). Who's Who in Nazi Germany. Routledge. p. 215. ISBN 9780415260381. Retrieved 2008-10-14. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |origmonth=, |month=, |chapterurl=, |origdate=, and |coauthors= (help)
  4. ^ a b c d e MARTIN, DOUGLAS (2005-12-02). "A Nazi Past, a Queens Home Life, an Overlooked Death". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-10-14. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  5. ^ a b c Lelyveld, Joseph (2005-03-06). "Breaking Away". New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2008-10-14. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  6. ^ Frühwald, Wolfgang (2004). Internationales Archiv Für Sozialgeschichte Der Deutschen Literatur. M. Niemeyer. p. 92. Retrieved 2008-10-16. ...Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan's pay at... Majdanek ... four times what she earned in a munitions factory. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |origmonth=, |month=, |chapterurl=, |origdate=, and |coauthors= (help) Original from the University of Michigan. Digitized March 18, 2008.
  7. ^ Schlink, Bernhard (1996-12-13). "Der Vorleser". Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin (in German). Retrieved 2008-10-14. Hermine Ryan nannte man "Kobyla, die Stute": weil sie mit ihren eisenbeschlagenen Stiefeln die Menschen trat. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  8. ^ a b c Lelyveld, Joseph (1964-07-14). "Former Nazi camp guard now a housewife in Queens" (PDF). New York Times. p. 10. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  9. ^ Bernstein, Adam (2005-09-21). "Simon Wiesenthal, 1908-2005: Victim Became Nazis' Prime Pursuer". Washington Post. p. A01. Retrieved 2008-10-14. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  10. ^ American Jewish Committee. "Central Europe - West Germany - Nazi Trials". American Jewish Year Book, 1974-75. New York: AJC Information Center and Digital Archives. p. 479. The prosecutor's office began an investigation into the case of the former concentration camp supervisor Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan who had been extradited by the United States to Germany where she was wanted for participating in the murder of 2,000 Jews. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |origmonth=, |month=, |origdate=, and |coauthors= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
  11. ^ Rabinowicz, Dorothy (1990). "The Holocaust as Living Memory". In Eliot Lefkowitz (ed.). Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University. Elie Wiesel, Elliot Lefkovitz, Robert McAfee Brown, Lucy Dawidowicz. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. pp. 34–45. ISBN 9780810109087. Retrieved 2008-10-15. In the winter of 1973 in New York City, deportation hearings were held for Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, wife of an American citizen, a resident of Queens, New York. Former SS guard at Ravensbrueck and Majdanek, Mrs. Ryan stood accused of beating inmates to death durint the years 1939-1944 while performing her duties as vice-commandant of the women's camp at Majadanek; of being responsible, also, for the death selection of hundreds of others. A stream of witnesses arrived at the small hearing room of the Immigration and Naturalization Service headquarters to give evidence. These were former prisoners at Majdanek. ... They had learned, among other things, that in this society a show of vengeance or any talk of it would be a form of behavior strictly to be avoided. They had learned...to say that they were not interested in vengeance: justice, only justice was their concern. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |origmonth=, |month=, |chapterurl=, |origdate=, and |coauthors= (help) (Conflates extradition and deportation.)
  12. ^ a b "Hermine Braunsteiner". Some Significant Cases. Simon Wiesenthal Archive. Retrieved 2008-10-15.
  13. ^ American Jewish Yearbook (PDF). Jewish Publication Society of America. ISBN 0-8276-0247. Retrieved 2008-10-15. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: length (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |origmonth=, |month=, |chapterurl=, |origdate=, and |coauthors= (help)
  14. ^ Wendel, Marcus. "Third Majdanek Trial". Axis History Factbook. Retrieved 2008-10-15. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |month= and |coauthors= (help) (Also cited in Jewish Virtual Library.)
  15. ^ "BEHIND BARS, FINALLY". New York Times. 1981-07-05. Retrieved 2008-10-15. She ran as far as the United States, to a marriage with an American and a home in Maspeth, Queens. But Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan couldn't hide indefinitely and, finally found out, she was stripped of American citizenship in 1971 and deported in 1973. And last week, after a five-year trial, she was convicted of murder as a guard in the Maidanek concentration camp near Lublin, Poland, during World War II. Seven other former guards were convicted with her, but of lesser offenses. They got relatively light sentences; Mrs. Ryan got life in prison. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); line feed character in |quote= at position 99 (help)

Further reading

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