by Alan Levy
‘The same thing happened to a relative of mine,’ his hostess remarked. ‘She was a prison guard and she got three years for boxing a couple of gypsies on the ear . . . But the times are changing and she got lucky. She went to Canada and married an American.’ Before departing, Wiesenthal’s undercover agent said he hoped to visit Canada and would like to look up their relative. His hosts were sure her name was Ryan and thought she was in Halifax, Nova Scotia. With this to go on, it took a Wiesenthal contact in Toronto only three weeks to trace Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan from Canada to her mail forwarding address in the US.
In the 1950s, Hermine Braunsteiner had met Brooklyn-born Russell Ryan when he took a vacation in Austria while serving as a US Air Force enlisted man in Germany. In 1959, she’d journeyed to Canada to marry him and he brought her to New York to five. There, she found work as a machine-operator in a clothing factory. On 15 January 1963, she had been sworn in as a US citizen at a naturalization ceremony in Brooklyn’s federal courthouse.
While the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) then had no provision forbidding admittance of war criminals, all immigrants had to sign a statement swearing that they had never participated in persecution of a minority because of race, creed, or national origin. And they were required to either swear that they had never been convicted of crimes or else explain whether they were political crimes and whether there were any special circumstances. Simon suspected Mrs Ryan had lied in both answers.
After Wiesenthal wrote to inform the US government of her past and received no immediate response, he contacted the New York Times with a packet of details. On Monday, 13 July 1964, reporter Joseph Lelyveld67 knocked on the door of a one-storey bungalow at 52–11 72nd Street in Maspeth, a predominantly Irish and German district of the Borough of Queens.
Lelyveld was greeted in heavily accented English by a large-boned woman standing five feet six inches tall with a stern mouth, blue eyes, and blonde hair turning grey. Wearing peppermint striped shorts and a matching sleeveless blouse, she had been painting the home that she and her husband had recently acquired.
‘Yes, that’s me,’ she told me. ‘All I did was what guards do in camps now. I was punished enough. I was in prison three years. Three years, can you imagine? And now they want something again from me?’
Lelyveld pointed out that, while her punishment had been for crimes at Ravensbrück, now she was accused of crimes at Majdanek. Had she ever been at Majdanek?
Yes, she replied, but for just a year – eight months of which she claimed she spent in the camp infirmary with a serious illness. ‘On the radio, all they talk is peace and freedom,’ she complained. ‘All right. Then fifteen or sixteen years after, why do they bother people?’
When Lelyveld told her the new evidence against her came from Simon Wiesenthal, she turned pale and burst into tears. Crossing her living-room to phone her husband at work, she declared: ‘This is the end! This is the end of everything for me.’
Wiesenthal had guessed right. Mrs Ryan hadn’t told the US authorities about her past. Nor had she told her husband. Russell Ryan, however, stuck by her. ‘My wife, sir, wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ he told the Times by phone. ‘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. She was not in charge of anything. Absolutely not, as God is my judge and your judge.’
‘Good!’ said Simon in Vienna. ‘Then let’s let a judge decide.’
Russell Ryan flailed at the Nazi-hunters: ‘These people are just swinging axes at random. Didn’t they ever hear the expression: “Let the dead rest”?’
And Simon, as deputy for the dead, said: ‘A million and a half people who perished at Majdanek will rest better when this woman comes before a court.’
Prodded by the Times, the INS said that Mrs Ryan’s false swearing ‘might’ prompt a second look at her immigration and naturalization papers, but indicated that such reviews rarely resulted in withdrawal of citizenship. Pestered by Wiesenthal, the INS applied to the Austrian government for a certified copy of her 1948 conviction in Graz. Obtaining this one document took nearly a year, but, in June 1965, INS sent Mrs Ryan’s dossier to the US Department of Justice urging it to file suit for revocation of her citizenship.
Justice examined the file for half a year and then sent it back to INS with a request for more information on her SS activities. INS contacted Wiesenthal – which he considered no small victory, for it was the first time the US government had called upon his expertise in Vienna – and he provided them with two survivors of Majdanek who identified Hermine Braunsteiner as a guard there. In October 1966, INS again submitted the file to Justice.
Back it came two months later. Justice’s question: Were any charges still pending against Hermine Braunsteiner (Ryan) in Austria?
Seven months later, in July 1967, INS’s answer was no.
Justice sat on the case for another year. Then, in July 1968 – four years after Wiesenthal and the Times had unmasked Mrs Ryan – Washington sent the file to the US Attorney in Brooklyn, who charged her in federal court with entering the US illegally by concealing her Austrian prison sentence. He asked that her citizenship be revoked.
In Maspeth, her neighbours rallied round her, proclaiming to the press that she was ‘a quiet person who never bothers anybody’, an industrious housewife fond of dogs and children. They could not and would not believe that she was the ‘cruel, brutal, and sadistic woman who unnecessarily beat and tortured defenceless prisoners’, as the Justice Department branded her, adding in an affidavit that she was also ‘an active participant in one of the most horrible and inhuman projects in history: the systematic imprisonment, torture, and murder of millions of human beings – of many nations, races, and religions – whose lives were deemed to be expendable by the Nazi regime.’
Simon Wiesenthal points out that this is a very common paradox: ‘From Eichmann and Stangl on down, ninety per cent of my “clients” were – sometimes before the war and certainly after the war – solid family men and women, devoted to their children, loyal to their relatives, hard-working, tax-paying good citizens and good neighbours who did their duty, tended their gardens, and seldom made trouble for anyone. But when they put on the uniform, they became something else: monsters, sadists, torturers, killers, desk murderers. The minute they took off the uniform, they became model citizens again. But I work only from deeds and eye-witnesses, not from character references or psychoanalysis. Still, so often I think about it. And what I think is that the key is the did their duty part.’
Nobody answered the Ryans’ front door when newsmen knocked. Reporters who lingered at the kerb were chased away by neighbours.
The case vanished into the back pages for another three years as the wheels of the Federal Court ground slowly towards a confrontation with justice. In 1971, as the case neared court, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan crossed up her pursuers by signing a consent decree to relinquish her citizenship without a trial. This took the case, for the time being, out of the hands of US attorney Robert Morse, a determined prosecutor. ‘We have witnesses who, if this case had gone to trial,’ said Morse, ‘would be able to testify in support of the allegations in the complaint.’ But now the ball was back in the court of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Some sources say the plea bargain in this case was that INS would make no effort to deport her as an undesirable or illegal alien. In 1971, soon after she signed the consent decree, Carl Burrows, INS assistant commissioner for investigations, wrote in a memorandum:
In all probability, there is insufficient evidence of a clear, unequivocal and convincing nature upon which we could initiate deportation proceedings. . .
According to New York Times investigator Howard Blum’s 1977 book, WANTED! The Search for Nazis in America, Commissioner Burrows said to INS chief trial lawyer Vincent Schiano, ‘Why punish her twice?’, and Schiano replied angrily and dismissively, ‘Go pound rocks.’
When he calmed down, Sch
iano wrote Burrows a memo arguing that ‘we must reject the suggestion of “further punishment” by deportations. Aliens become deportable by reason of certain criminal convictions.’ Early in 1972, Schiano urged in another memo that ‘an investigator be assigned to this case to work under my direction and make proper requests of the various government agencies and take control of overseas leads.’ The investigator appointed, Anthony DeVito, was a twenty-year INS veteran who, as a GI in 1945, had entered the Dachau concentration camp hours after it was liberated and witnessed the stoning of a collaborator by fellow inmates.
An admirer of Wiesenthal’s, DeVito contacted his hero in Vienna and every other source he could on Majdanek and Ravensbrück. As American Jewish organizations joined Wiesenthal in drumming up a clamour for action, a neo-Nazi fund-raising committee called the Hermine Ryan Defence Foundation was formed to finance further delay.
Just as there are Jewish prostitutes, there are misguided Jewish crazies, too. At 1.30 in the morning on Saturday, 11 March 1972, a young couple at 52–11 79th Street in Queens was awakened by the sound of glass breaking downstairs in their living-room. Seconds later, there was an explosion and their curtains caught fire. Somebody had tossed a fire-bomb through their window.
Gathering up their three small children, the wife ran for help while her husband put out the fire himself. Half an hour later, a New York newspaper received a call from a spokesman for the ‘Jewish Resistance Assault Team’, who said his ‘organization’ had just bombed the home of ‘Mrs Anna Harmione Ryan’. The ‘team’ did have the right house number, but the wrong street: the Ryans lived at 52-11 72nd Street, not 79th Street.
Until May 1972, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan had led a charmed life for an accused murderess in America. She had not yet been in custody and wouldn’t be for many months. In signing the consent decree, she had made no admission of guilt. Nobody had testified in public against her. But all this was about to change, thanks to Wiesenthal’s and DeVito’s and Schiano’s persistence.
On 1 May, an opening hearing was postponed after a few minutes when Mrs Ryan’s attorney, John J. Barry, discovered to his dismay that the court appointed translator of German-language documents was Jewish.
Procedure in a deportation inquiry differs from a courtroom trial. The hearings can be held at widely spaced intervals in the nearest INS office: in this case, on West Broadway in Lower Manhattan. ‘They appear and fade away like astronomical phenomena, convening for a day or two to hear testimony of a witness, then recessing for a few weeks, or a month, or longer, until another witness is ready,’ writes former US prosecutor Allan A. Ryan Jnr – no relation to Hermine, except that the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which he headed from 1980 to 1983, grew out of her case, as did the tide of his incisive 1984 memoir of prosecuting Nazi criminals in America: Quiet Neighbors.
The defendant testified first. She said that in May 1950, not long after her release from an Austrian prison, a court in Vienna had told her she never had to report her arrest or conviction to anyone. Therefore, any time the question was raised – in Europe or North America – ‘I said no’, which she considered ‘a truthful answer’.
Starting gently, INS attorney Schiano asked her whether she had ever done anything she was ashamed of while employed at Ravensbrück and Majdanek. Her reply was a firm ‘no’.
All that she would acknowledge doing was occasionally hitting prisoners, but ‘only with an open hand’, never with fist or whip. She claimed not to have been aware of what happened to prisoners in Ravensbrück, a slave-labour camp where doctors made medical experiments upon women, but conceded that she knew Majdanek was an ‘extermination camp’. She was ‘shocked and appalled’, she said, but ‘it was not in my power to do anything. I was too little.’
The dimensions of her work loomed larger the next month when Eva Konikowski, also of Queens, swore to tell the truth. A Polish Catholic from Wiesenthal’s former home city of Lwów, she had been jailed in 1941 for hiding Jews from the Nazi death squads. As a prisoner at Majdanek in 1943, she saw Hermine Braunsteiner and another guard loading children on to trucks bound for the gas chamber. ‘They gave the children some pieces of candy,’ Mrs Konikowski recalled, ‘but that didn’t fool them. They were screaming and crying “Mama!”’ Eva Konikowski, too, had screamed – so hard that, later, she had to have an operation on the glands of her neck. She also testified that she had been under psychiatric care for ‘what I went through’ at Majdanek.
Matter-of-factly, defence attorney Barry asked Mrs Konikowski if she personally had ever seen Mrs Ryan kill anybody. Her answer was no.
That defence tactic, however, was laid to rest on 8 September 1972, when Aaron Kaufman, seventy-one, an Orthodox Jewish survivor of eight Nazi concentration camps who was living in Westchester County, testified that he had seen Braunsteiner whip five women and a child to death on three occasions in Majdanek. This frail elderly gentleman had once been a human ‘horse’ there, hauling a heavy wooden cart loaded with food and coal. An expression of sympathy from Schiano was waved away politely as Kaufman, speaking English softly with Yiddish inflection, explained he had bribed his way into such a good job; otherwise he wouldn’t be alive in New York thirty years later.
Hauling coal one day in May 1942, he had seen five women pulling up weeds within a barbed-wire corridor. Kaufman, who had been about six yards away, told the hearing: ‘Suddenly, Braunsteiner appeared, spoke to the women for a minute, then started beating two of them with her whip. Both died.’
Under questioning, he said he had known both victims. One was Sara Fermeinska, about twenty-six, and the other was named Secholovic, about thirty. He added that when it became known he had witnessed their deaths, he was called out from his barracks and given twenty-five lashes across the back.
On another occasion, Kaufman was on a detail carrying lumber. Coming upon a group of women collecting stones and lumber for the men to haul, they stopped to chat. This was unheard of in Majdanek and the guards sounded an alarm. ‘Mrs Braunsteiner came along,’ said Kaufman, ‘and when she saw, she started using her whip again and killed two other ladies.’
In June 1942, Kaufman and other ‘horses’ were hauling food from the kitchen to the women’s camp, about a kilometre away. At the gate, however, they were blocked. ‘Three or four hundred ladies were there,’ he related. ‘Mrs Braunsteiner was telling the ladies they would have to give their children away because the children were going to a summer camp where they would get milk two times a day. The mothers didn’t want to give up their children because they knew what would happen. Mrs Braunsteiner started hitting one woman with a child so long the woman fell down. The lady was dead and the child was dead. We had to move them aside and then get our wagons in.’
Kaufman withstood several hours of cross-examination by defence attorney Barry, who asked him if he was seeking revenge.
‘No,’ said Kaufman. ‘I’m just interested in the truth.’
‘The truth,’ said lawyer Barry, ‘is just what I’m after.’
‘Erev Rosh Hashanah,’68 said Kaufman, ‘it must be the truth.’
Barry hadn’t finished cross-examining the witness on his painful testimony when the hearing adjourned for a fortnight (instead of the scheduled one-week interval) to avoid confrontation with a rally against Mrs Ryan outside INS headquarters. The protest had been announced by a group called the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization. When the hearing did reconvene, Kaufman did not reappear. He had suffered a heart attack and was too sick to testify. This, of course, worked to the defence’s advantage: Mrs Ryan had not been given a full chance to confront her accuser. . .
Other witnesses, too, reported strange and sinister happenings after testifying. Eva Konikowski received neatly typed postcards warning that ‘dirty Jewish witnesses will be killed.’ The day after another survivor, Nuna Wiezbicka, testified, there was a knock on her door. When she looked through the peephole, she saw a man wearing a ski mask and hissing, ‘Witness . . . witness
. . . witness.’ Mary Finkelstein identified Mrs Ryan as Braunsteiner from an old photo and testified that she’d seen her ‘clobber’ a woman inmate of Majdanek to the ground and scream, ‘You pig! You God damn Jew! Stand up straight!’ According to Mrs Finkelstein, ‘she dropped and didn’t get up – ever.’ When Mrs Finkelstein returned to her home in Brooklyn, the phone was ringing. A man’s voice informed her that ‘all Jews will some day be killed.’
That 17 September, thanks to the Ryan hearings, Majdanek Day, the annual return of Polish and other European survivors, was covered by the international press for the first time. Hanna Mierzejewska – a survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück as well as Majdanek who was working at the American school in Warsaw – led reporters past the brooding Stalin Gothic war memorial, drab barracks, rusted barbed wire, and barren fields to ‘the real Majdanek memorial’: a mound of earth containing the ashes and bones of more than 18,000 Jews who were murdered there in one day: Sunday, 3 November 1943, when Hermine Braunsteiner was still stationed at Majdanek.69
The victims, she said, were ‘our Jews and those from two other camps near Lublin. . .’ Pointing to a grassy field that stops at the edge of industrial Lublin, she said: ‘They were ordered to run down that slope. As they reached the ditches, they were shot with machine-guns. They didn’t want the rest of us to hear, so the loudspeakers were turned up and played music all day.’
When she arrived at Majdanek in January 1943, Mrs Mierzejewska – known as ‘Pant Hanka’ – was chosen as a block leader because she spoke German. In that capacity, she matched wits with Hermine Braunsteiner almost every day: hiding children and sick and elderly women, for which she was often whipped over barbed wire. For the lives she saved and example she set, she was awarded her country’s highest civilian decoration, the Poland Reborn medal.
