Background
Hermine Braunsteiner was born in Vienna on 16 July 1919.
Hermine Braunsteiner was born in Vienna on 16 July 1919.
Already a guard supervisor at Ravensbrück concentration camp at the age of twenty Braunsteiner was transferred in October 1942 to the death camp at Majdanek where she remained until March 1944, serving as a supervising warden.
She subsequently returned to Ravensbrück after two years and was arrested by the Allied authorities and imprisoned on 6 May 1946.
Released on 18 April 1947, she was again imprisoned from 7 April 1948 until 22 November 1949, after an Austrian court of murder had convicted her of charges including assassination, manslaughter and infanticide. Following her second release, she was granted an amnesty by an Austrian civil court from further prosecution in her native country.
In 1959 she entered the United States following her marriage to Russell Ryan, an American electrical engineer whom she had met w hile he was on holiday in Austria. She settled down in the Queens district of New York, receiving American citizenship on 19 January 1963.
Five years later the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal discovered her real identity and the American immigration authorities began procedures in 1971 to revoke her citizenship on the grounds that she had never revealed her Austrian war crimes conviction. Affidavits were submitted by former Majdanek camp inmates alleging that she had taken part in the selection of about two thousand women and children for the gas chambers.
She was accused of cruel, brutal and sadistic treatment of defenceless prisoners and of having ‘injured and offended the human dignity of inmates' at Ravensbrück. In 1971 a de-naturalization decree deprived her of her American citizenship and on 14 March 1973 an extradition warrant was issued in Düsseldorf demanding that she stand Trial in West Germany on charges of killing concentration camp inmates during World War II. She was extradited from the United States and sent back to West Germany after losing her five-year procedural fight to avoid trial.
On 30 May 1981 the sixty-one-year-old former SS guard was sentenced to life imprisonment.
According to one witness at the highly publicized Düsseldorf War Crimes Trial which began in 1976, she ‘seized children by the hair and threw them onto the trucks headed for the gas chambers'.
She was known to Majdanek inmates as ‘the Stomping Mare’ because of the brutal kicks she delivered with her steel-studded jackboots.
Physical Characteristics: The pale, blonde, blue-eyed.