Hermine Braunsteiner

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Hermine Braunsteiner, (July 16, 1919 – April 19, 1999), was a Nazi war criminal.

Born in Vienna, Austria, to an affluent family, she finished school and dreamed of becoming a nurse. Unable to accomplish that goal, Hermine tried to become a servant along with her sister in England, but this too turned up dry. In 1939 Hermine was picked from her job at a Heinkel aircraft plant in Berlin and sent to be trained at Ravensbrück concentration camp near Berlin. There she was well known for killing old women by stamping on them. In October 1942, because of disagreements between Braunsteiner and chief overseer Maria Mandel, she was transferred to the Majdanek death and concentration camp outside Lublin, Poland. She was then promoted to assistant wardress under Oberaufseherin Elsa Erich along with five other women. Her abuse and sadism 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. She also killed many further women by stomping on them, earning her the nickname "The Stomping Mare."

She was regarded as one of the worst Aufseherin in Majdanek next to Hildegard Lachert and Elisabeth Knoblich. In March 1944, after two years of service at Majdanek, Hermine was ordered back to Ravensbrück as Majdanek began evacuations. In Ravensbrück Hermine was promoted to head of a work detail and in late 1944 she was promoted to supervising wardress at the Genthin subcamp of Ravensbrück, located outside Berlin. Witnesses say that there Hermine abused many of the prisoners with a special whip she carried. In May 1945, 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. On May 6, 1946, Braunsteiner was arrested by an Austrian court and imprisoned until April 18, 1947. She was again arrested on April 7, 1948, for assassination, infanticide and manslaughter at Ravensbrück but once again released on November 22, 1949. None of these charges ever mentioned crimes in Majdanek.

Following her release from prison the Austrian government promised not to charge her with any additional crimes and granted her amnesty. During the following years she worked at hotels and restaurants. She met an American soldier called Russell Ryan who became her fiancé. In 1959 Hermine Braunsteiner married Ryan, then a businessman in Queens, New York. This granted her U.S. citizenship on January 19, 1963. Within five years, she had been discovered. One account of her discovery holds that the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal discovered her real identity and reported this to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. However, in his memoirs, former New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld writes that, when he was a young reporter at the Times, Wiesenthal alerted the paper to the possibility that Braunsteiner had married a man named Russell Ryan and was living in Maspeth, a neighborhood of the borough of Queens in New York City. By tracking down women named "Mrs. Ryan", Lelyveld eventually arrived at Braunsteiner's house. He writes that she greeted him at her front doorstep and said "My God, I knew this would happen. You've come."

In 1971 the Department of Justice began to strip Hermine Ryan of her citizenship because she was an alien of "questionable quality." During the next year Hermine sat with her husband in a U.S. court in Queens hearing survivors' testimonies against the former SS guard. Finally on March 14, 1973, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan became the first Nazi criminal ever to be extradited by the U.S. 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. On May 30, 1980, the 61-year-old former SS woman was given a life sentence for her sadistic acts at the Majdanek camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan died on April 19, 1999, after being released from prison in 1996, as a result of complications of diabetes at the age of 79.