Hermine Braunsteiner

Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan (July 16, 1919 – April 19, 1999) was an Austrian SS Helferin and female camp guard at Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camps. She was the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States to face trial in West Germany.

Braunsteiner was convicted for her complicity and collaborating in murders of over 1,000 people during the Holocaust. She was sentenced to life imprisonment by the District Court of Düsseldorf on April 30, 1981. She was released on health grounds in 1996, and died three years later.

Early life

Braunsteiner was born in Vienna, the youngest of seven children in a strictly observant Roman Catholic family, variously described as petite bourgeoisie (kleinbürgerlich) or working class. Her father, Friedrich Braunsteiner, was a butcher and a chauffeur for a brewery owner, while her mother was a washwoman and custodian. She was raised under impoverished circumstances in the Nußdorf suburb of Döbling.

Braunsteiner graduated from Hauptschule in 1933 with aspirations to become a nurse. Due to the death of her father in 1934, however, she was required to find employment to support the family and thus unable to enter nursing school. Braunsteiner worked as a maid, mostly in Vienna, though she briefly moved to live with relatives in the Netherlands for three months in summer 1936. Upon her return, she was hired as an assembly worker at the brewery her father formerly worked for. Having become a German citizen through the annexation, Braunsteiner filed a request to undergo nurse training with the in Berlin, to no success. In August of the same year, she relocated to Germany for a job at a munition factory in Grüneberg before moving to Berlin to work at the Heinkel aircraft works. After three years, a disagreement with Mandl led Braunsteiner to request a transfer in October 1942. By then most of the Aufseherinnen had been moved into Majdanek from the Alter Flughafen labor camp.

Braunsteiner had a number of roles 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 became known for her wild rages and tantrums. She was noted for her particularly cruel treatment of children, whom she called "useless eaters", regularly punishing them for minor infractions such as wearing stockings and pillows for warmth or incorrectly sewing their identification numbers to clothes, and in one instance, she beat a group of starved children with a ladle for coming too early for food distribution. One witness at her later trial in Düsseldorf described an incident where a prisoner had concealed his child inside a backpack and upon Braunsteiner seeing movement in the bag, she whipped the child for several minutes before personally dragging her to the gas chamber. For her work, she received the War Merit Cross, 2nd class, in 1943.

Ravensbrück again and the Genthin Subcamp

In January 1944, Braunsteiner was ordered back to Ravensbrück as Majdanek began evacuations due to the approaching front line. She was promoted to supervising wardress at the Genthin subcamp of Ravensbrück, located outside Berlin. A French physician, who was interned at Genthin recalled the sadism of Braunsteiner while she ruled the camp: "I watched her administer twenty-five lashes with a riding crop to a young Russian girl suspected of having tried sabotage. Her back was full of lashes, but I was not allowed to treat her immediately."

Post-war

On May 7, 1945, Braunsteiner fled the camp ahead of the Soviet Red Army. She then returned to Vienna, She worked at low-level jobs in hotels and restaurants in Carinthia until emigrating.

Emigration and marriage

American national Russell Ryan met Braunsteiner whilst working as a US Air Force mechanic stationed in Germany. They married in October 1958, after they had emigrated to Nova Scotia, Canada. She entered the United States in April 1959, becoming an American citizen on January 19, 1963. They lived in Maspeth, Queens, New York City, where she was known as a fastidious housewife with a friendly manner, married to a construction worker. 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 City. They assigned Joseph Lelyveld, then a young reporter, to find "Mrs. Ryan". They first lived at 54–44 82nd Street in western Elmhurst and moved to 52–11 72nd Street 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 stated that she had been at Majdanek only a year, eight months of that time 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."

Extradition

A prosecutor in Düsseldorf began investigating Braunsteiner's wartime behavior, and in 1973 the West German government requested her extradition, accusing her of joint responsibility in the death of 200,000 people. On March 22, 1973, Braunsteiner was taken into custody as she awaited deportation. She was held at Rikers Island, then at the Nassau County Jail.

The United States court denied procedural claims that her denaturalization had been invalid (U.S. citizens could not be extradited to West 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.

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 West Germany. One of the witnesses against Braunsteiner 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 Braunsteiner and the steel-studded jackboots with which she dealt blows to inmates.

Death

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

After the publicity surrounding Ryan's extradition, the United States government established in 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.

In popular culture

The novel The Mare by Angharad Hampshire is based on Hermine Braunsteiner's life. It was first published by Northodox Press in 2024, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2025, and is being republished by Penguin Hamish Hamilton in August, 2026.