A Nazi Past, a Queens Home Life, an Overlooked Death
Hyfler/Rosner
December 2, 2005 Friday
Late Edition - Final
A Nazi Past, a Queens Home Life, an Overlooked Death
BYLINE: By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan was a Queens homemaker in 1964
when The New York Times revealed her notorious past as a
vicious Nazi death camp guard.
Nearly a decade later, she became the first United States
citizen to be extradited for war crimes. She was sent to
West Germany, where she was tried, convicted and sentenced
to life in prison.
That was in 1981, and little has been written about her
since, although a German newspaper took note of her release,
for health reasons, in 1996.
It turns out that she died three years later, on April 19,
1999, at the age of 79.
Her death appears to have gone unrecorded by American
newspapers and magazines, although it is noted on the
Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia and in a footnote in a 2005
memoir, ''Omaha Blues,'' by Joseph Lelyveld, a former
executive editor of The Times, who recounts his experience
as the young reporter who knocked on the door of the Ryan
home more than 40 years ago.
Official word of Mrs. Ryan's death came in recent weeks from
the Simon Wiesenthal Center's office in Israel, in response
to questions by another Times reporter who was researching
an article on the former Maidanek death camp in Poland,
where Mrs. Ryan was once assigned.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli center, said he
believed the death had been noted in some German papers. He
said he did not know the cause, but in 1996, when the German
government pardoned her from her life sentence, she suffered
from diabetes and had had a leg amputated.
Dr. Zuroff said Mrs. Ryan's extradition and conviction were
among the few successful legal actions against Nazis in the
United States before the Justice Department Office of
Special Investigations was established in 1979.
At the time she was discovered, Mrs. Ryan was living as the
wife of an electrical construction worker in Maspeth, where
she was known for her scrupulous housecleaning and friendly
manner. When she was fighting deportation in 1972, The Times
quoted neighbors saying her gruesome past was impossible for
them to believe.
Survivors of the Maidanek concentration and death camp, near
Lublin, told of her whipping women to death, seizing
children by the hair and throwing them on trucks to take
them to the gas chamber, kicking away a stool to hang a
young girl, and stomping old women to death with her
jackboots, among other cruelties. Her nickname was the
Stomping Mare.
In her five-and-a-half-year trial by a West German court,
which ended in mid-1981, Mrs. Ryan was convicted of just two
murders. The deaths of possible witnesses and fading
memories may have weakened the prosecution's case on other
counts. Also, rules limited convictions to individual crimes
actually witnessed.
Hermine Braunsteiner was born in Vienna on July 16, 1919.
Her father was a butcher and not involved in politics. She
received a strict Roman Catholic education and first wanted
to be a nurse.
She instead worked in a brewery and as a household servant
before going to work at the Heinkel Aircraft Works in
Berlin, where she adopted the Nazi ideology. She applied to
work at the Ravensbruck women's concentration camp in part
to get more pay, starting in 1939.
In October 1942, she was transferred to Maidanek and
promoted to assistant warden. She became known for whipping
women for not sewing on their prison numbers correctly.
In 1944 she was sent back to Ravensbruck to lead a work
detail. She had risen to supervising warden when the Soviet
Army approached the camp. She fled to Vienna before the
Soviet soldiers liberated the camp on July 23, 1944.
In 1946, she was arrested in Austria and handed over to
Allied authorities, who shuffled her between internment and
prisoner-of-war camps. In 1949 Austrian authorities again
arrested her, and this time tried her.
She was convicted of assassination, infanticide and
manslaughter at Ravensbruck in 1941 and 1942. Maidanek was
barely mentioned.
Mrs. Ryan was sentenced to three years in prison, but was
released early, in 1950. The Austrian government promised
not to charge her with any additional crimes and granted her
amnesty.
She then worked at hotels and restaurants, and met Russell
Ryan, described in various sources as an American soldier or
an American construction worker in Germany. In 1958, they
moved to Nova Scotia, marrying in October of that year.
In April 1959, they moved to Queens, and she became an
American citizen in January 1963.
Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, who died in September,
wrote in ''Justice Not Vengeance'' (1989) that he was
approached in January 1964 in the Cafe Royal in Tel Aviv by
three survivors of Maidanek. They told him about the cruel
guard called Kobyla, the Polish word for mare.
One of his aides went to Vienna and discovered from her
friends that she was in Halifax. Mr. Wiesenthal learned from
a friend in Toronto that she had moved to Queens and got the
address. The Nazi hunter then told the Vienna correspondent
of The Times this information.
Mr. Lelyveld, as a young reporter, was assigned to check out
the tip, but wrote that he was not given a specific address.
He knocked on many doors of Queens residents with the last
name Ryan.
On July 14, 1964, Mr. Lelyveld wrote that Mrs. Ryan readily
acknowledged that she was Hermine Braunsteiner of Maidanek.
She protested that she had already been punished in Austria,
and said she was sick in the infirmary for much of the time
she was assigned to Maidanek. Her husband told the reporter
that he did not know she was a prison guard until Mr.
Lelyveld informed him.
''This is the end of everything for me,'' Mrs. Ryan said.
In 1971, she was stripped of her citizenship because she had
concealed her criminal conviction from American immigration
authorities. Germany and Poland then applied for her
extradition.
She feared going to Poland, but said she was agreeable to
going to West Germany. In August 1973, Mrs. Ryan was
expelled from the United States. Her trial in Dusseldorf
began in November 1975. With the many witnesses and
procedural delays, it did not end until mid-1981.
Mr. Lelyveld wrote that in prison, Mrs. Ryan refused to
speak to other inmates and liked to sew dolls and soft toys.
When she was released, she went to a nursing home in
Bochum-Linden where her husband lived.
A German weekly, Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, wrote of the
couple in 1996, saying he had been seen pushing her through
the market in a wheelchair, and asking her if she would like
a bouquet of flowers. She did not respond. He looked at his
watch and pushed on. Nothing is known of him now.
Bill Schenley
> homemaker in 1964 when The New York Times
> revealed her notorious past as a vicious Nazi death
> camp guard.
<snipped>
> ... a footnote in a 2005 memoir, ''Omaha Blues,'' by
> Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The
> Times, who recounts his experience as the young
> reporter who knocked on the door of the Ryan home
> more than 40 years ago.
FROM: "Omaha Blues," by Joseph Lelyveld ~
My dad went to Mississippi to pay his dues in what was called the
''freedom summer'' of 1964. He would have gone anyway, I think, but at
this moment he was at a turning point; to all appearances freer
himself, in the sense of less attached, than he would be at any other
moment in his life.
His own explanation was that he had been moved to volunteer in a voter
registration project by an outrage that no one could ignore: the
abduction, disappearance and presumed murder of three young civil
rights workers -- James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael
Schwerner -- outside the Neshoba County town of Philadelphia.
My experiences on the following Friday amounted, metaphorically
speaking, to a collision at an intersection, a pileup of various
issues, public and personal, making for one of the densest, longest
days of my life.
That day started eventfully enough for me. As a freshman
general-assignment reporter in the newsroom of The Times, my task that
morning was to go to Queens and check out a tip from Simon Wiesenthal,
the renowned Nazi hunter in Vienna, that a notorious death-camp guard
and convicted war criminal, Hermine Braunsteiner, was now living there
under the name Mrs. Ryan. If she was using her original Christian
name, she would be known as Hermine Ryan. And if Wiesenthal, who had
helped trace Adolf Eichmann to Buenos Aires, was right, she could be
found in a blue-collar neighborhood called Maspeth.
The assignment seemed to promise a day of tough sleuthing. Maspeth in
that time contained a lot of Ryans. I made a list of all their
addresses and started ringing doorbells. It wasn't so tough. I had to
ring only two. When I asked the first Mrs. Ryan I encountered whether
she knew of another who had come fairly recently from Austria,
presumably with a German accent, she said that would be Russell Ryan's
wife and directed me to an address on 72nd Street.
There the door was opened by a tall, large-boned woman in short shorts
striped pink and white, with a matching sleeveless blouse, her hair up
in curlers; she was brandishing a paintbrush. The conversation at the
threshold of the little house, as I have remembered it down through
the years, went something like this: ''Mrs. Ryan, I need to ask about
your time in Poland, at the Maidanek camp, during the war.''
''Oh, my God, I knew this would happen,'' the Maspeth housewife said,
breaking into sobs. ''You've come.''
Now noticing that the quotation doesn't appear in the article I
subsequently wrote, I wonder if she actually said, ''You've come,'' or
if I supplied the words when telling others that I was received by
Mrs. Ryan in Maspeth as if she had expected me. Not in print but in
occasional recountings over the years, I may have forgotten the ''as
if.''
In any event, mine was the finger of fate, and it was I who had to
listen, as we sat in her tidy living room with its Alpine scenes and
cuckoo clock, to her weepy, self-pitying narrative of how she had
never been anything but a lowly guard, with no authority or choice,
who anyway had spent most of her time at the death camp in the
infirmary.
When I got back to the newsroom, an editor I knew slightly stopped by
my desk with a sad, strangely deferential expression on his face. ''I
was sorry to hear about your father,'' he said, speaking softly.
Inevitably, I heard condolence in his words and saw it in his face.
The man realized I had no idea what he was talking about and started
backing off. I had to pursue him, seize his arm and practically shake
him to get him to tell me that my dad had been hospitalized in
Mississippi after being attacked near Hattiesburg by a couple of local
whites. After that frightening overture, I heard the blunt facts with
relief. At least he was alive.
Some 30 years later I opened a survey form from Hattiesburg, Miss.,
that had been mailed to newspaper editors across the country. ''Have
you ever heard of Hattiesburg, Mississippi?'' the first question
asked. I checked ''yes.'' ''If yes, in what context?'' it continued.
''My father was beaten there with a tire iron in the summer of 1964,''
I wrote.
He had been in Mississippi for four days, in Hattiesburg for three.
The movement had assigned him two tasks. One was to reach out to the
Jewish community in Hattiesburg as part of a broader attempt to soften
local resistance to the struggle for blacks' rights, the other, to go
door to door on back streets where blacks lived to encourage residents
to try to register to vote despite all the hurdles white registrars
could be relied upon to throw in their path.
He got precisely nowhere with Hattiesburg's Jews.
In the black community it was different.
The three hours he spent canvassing prospective black voters that
Friday morning had been especially encouraging. He and the white
college student he had been accompanying then walked to a black
Baptist church where lunch awaited the canvassers.
On the way, as he later explained to two F.B.I. agents who took his
statement, they ran into two black high-school girls who had been
canvassing on another street with another white college student. So
now there were three white men and two black girls walking together
past the Hattiesburg stockyard at lunchtime. It was a provocation,
they soon learned. Before long, a cream-colored pickup truck, with no
license plate, barreled to a screeching stop. Two large white men
jumped down from the truck, cursing ''nigger lovers'' as they charged
up the slope. The younger, bigger one carried a tire iron. In that
instant, my dad would tell his congregation in his first sermon after
he returned from Mississippi, he thought of Ionesco's play
''Rhinoceros.''
''I thought of men being converted into rhinoceroses, and this was the
way they charged us.''
The girls ran; the other two volunteers remembered their training in
nonviolent resistance and moved away in opposite directions so as not
to give their assailants a bunched target. They then ducked their
heads, pulled their knees up and rolled over to shield their most
vulnerable organs. My dad had been through a training session himself,
but two impulses got in the way of his training. One was to put
himself between the onrushing men and the girls; the other was to
speak to the attackers. It all happened in seconds, and he hadn't yet
got a word out when the tire iron came cracking down on his head,
leaving a deep gash on his brow, just missing his right eye. It came
down again, on the back of his skull, then the young attacker moved
off to bash one of the students while the other guy took his turn,
kicking and pummeling my dad where he had fallen.
The blood from my dad's head wounds had soaked through his shirt by
the time he and the others finally reached the church. From there he
was taken to Methodist Hospital.
By then the story of the assault and his picture were out on the
wires.
That afternoon I managed to get through to my dad in the hospital in
Hattiesburg. From a medical point of view, he had been lucky. He had
lost a lot of blood and had needed some stitches on his brow, but he
had escaped brain damage and, as far as the local doctor could
determine, a concussion. The plan was to keep him overnight for rest
and observation and release him the next day. Having established that
much, I returned to the case of Hermine Ryan, nee Braunsteiner, the
Maidanek guard in whose living room I had sat that morning in Maspeth.
I scurried up to the editorial library of The Times to see what I
could learn about Maidanek, a camp that stood in plain view on the
outskirts of Lublin, a major city in eastern Poland. The gas chambers
and furnaces went into operation there toward the end of 1942 and
continued belching smoke until the Red Army drew near in 1944.
As many as 360,000 people had been killed there, the majority Jews
(mostly Polish but also German, French and Dutch). When the wind was
right, the stench drifted toward town.
That was the overview.
Looking for anecdotal testimony on atrocities, I picked up a volume
called ''The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People.''
In the early 60's the field of Holocaust studies was not the industry
it subsequently became; the word ''Holocaust'' itself was just coming
into vogue as a term referring uniquely to the fate of Europe's Jews
under the Nazis. But I didn't have to dig deep to find Mrs. Ryan.
An SS guard named Hermine Braunsteiner figured prominently in the
testimony of Maidanek survivors. Those accounts gave the lie to her
own self-portrait of a hapless young conscript convalescing in the
infirmary. She was one of a small number of female SS guards at
Maidanek who had been charged with acts of extreme cruelty, even by
the ferocious standards of the place. They selected inmates for the
gas chambers on whims of their own.
They took part in killings.
''I myself saw babies taken from their mothers and killed before their
eyes,'' said a witness quoted in ''The Black Book.''
Mrs. Ryan, called Braunstein there rather than Braunsteiner, turned up
on the same page.
No single crime was ascribed to her, but she headed the list of
wardresses responsible for ''unparalleled atrocities.''
The testimony of the survivors commanded credence, even if I hadn't
spoken to any myself.
Novice that I was, it didn't occur to me that I might take more than
one day on the assignment and find some. It didn't occur to my editors
either; the operating assumption of newspaper reporting in that era
was that most articles could be written in a day. I bolstered my
account of my discovery of a Nazi death-camp guard in Maspeth with a
few paragraphs of appalling, graphic description drawn from ''The
Black Book.'' That was enough for it to be chosen for the front page.
Then, as I was finishing up, my phone rang. The call was from Russell
Ryan, the electrician who met Hermine Braunsteiner in Vienna, then
took her to America as his wife, enabling her to become a citizen. He
had never heard of Maidanek. He had known nothing of his wife's
wartime experiences, he said. But now, having just heard her version,
he struggled to sound emphatic and manly, to banish any doubt from his
voice.
''My wife, sir, wouldn't hurt a fly,'' he said. ''There's no more
decent person on this earth.''
He succeeded only in sounding pathetic. He had never heard before that
evening that his wife had been convicted as a war criminal in 1946 and
had served brief terms in prison -- for activities at Ravensbruck, not
Maidanek -- and could now face deportation for failing to acknowledge
as much in her immigration papers. At that moment, I felt for him.
Every word out of his mouth showed how dimly he understood his
predicament.
''Didn't they ever hear the expression 'Let the dead rest'?'' he
asked.
I would have been totally offended if anyone had suggested to me that
evening that I had been thrown off-balance emotionally by the assault
on my father and that I was now too overwrought to think clearly. At
this distance, when I suggest it to myself, I am unable to reach a
conclusion. All I know is what I did. I went to the night city editor
and said I was bothered that I had not had time to try to verify the
most hideous of the allegations against the death-camp guards or draw
a firm connection between any particular act of gruesomeness and Mrs.
Ryan. We wouldn't, I said, treat anyone except a Nazi that way.
A discussion then followed with a lawyer who said there was no way a
Nazi could win a libel case in New York. That hadn't been my point,
but it led to further discussion with the news editor, who, sensing
the uncertainty of an inexperienced reporter, decided to knock the
article off the front page.
As a way of showing that it had not buckled under to that decision,
the Metro desk then decided to hold the article so as to be able to
get it ''fronted'' another day.
Nevertheless, it ran on an inside page several days later, on my day
off, shorn of the paragraphs I thought needed strengthening.
The following morning I was given a dressing-down by the new Metro
editor, Abe Rosenthal, who was to become the dominant figure at The
Times for nearly two decades. With an insistence that could easily be
mistaken for fury, Abe said something like this:
''If I get a story of yours on the front page, don't you ever again go
behind my back to get it taken off.''
Looking back now from my own perspective as a former editor, I have to
admit that Abe had a point. But all that -- my search that morning for
the death-camp guard, the decision on deadline not to run the story,
even the beating of my dad in Mississippi -- proved to be prelude.
The climax of that long and long-ago July day didn't really occur for
me till I got back to our tiny walk-up apartment on Second Avenue with
its nearly elegant glass doors and parquet floor tilting down toward a
huge, sooty terrace out back.
---
Photo:
http://www.olfen.de/gesamtschule/unterricht/dlk-12-kaea-2003/images/braunsteiner.jpg (Hermine Braunsteiner)