by Alan Levy
James Feron, who was there for the New York Times, reported that when the name of Braunsteiner was raised, the recollections came reluctantly, for the survivors went to this annual reunion ‘to greet each other rather than to recall the horrors of this place.’ But one woman told him: ‘Yes, I remember Braunsteiner. We feared her most of all. She was a big woman [who] used her whip a lot.’ Another said that the camp’s woman commandant had been captured, tried, and executed by the Poles. Other subordinates had also been extradited to Poland.
A Warsaw woman dentist, Dr Danuta Czaykowska-Medryk, fifty-one, said she was saving her memories for the following week in New York. She was flying there to testify against Mrs Ryan. The case against her was entering a new phase. With Wiesenthal’s intervention, an Iron Curtain country was not only supplying evidence, but also allowing residents to travel to the West.
Dr Czaykowska-Medryk and Dr Suzanne Weinstein Lambolez, a Parisian physician, both arrived in New York on 19 September 1972. INS had provided plane tickets and promised them $37 a day in expenses, barely the price of a ratty New York City hotel room. Upon landing, however, they were told the federal funds for their stay had not yet cleared. With the stop-and-start schedule of hearings and possible recalls, INS wasn’t finished with them until early November. To keep them afloat financially, investigator DeVito passed a hat around the fourteenth floor of the INS building, where he worked, and raised $604. The government’s expense money didn’t clear until 9 November, the day before the witnesses left the country.
DeVito was convinced that Nazis infiltrated the federal bureaucracy and even INS to put obstacles in his witnesses’ way. He cited a call his wife, Frieda, received during the hearings. Speaking German in a calm, unctuous voice, the caller asked her why she was letting her husband hunt Nazis. Didn’t she know this could be dangerous? After all, hadn’t she been born in Germany and lived through the war there? The DeVitos’ phone was unlisted and he felt that ‘only someone in the Service’ would also have known that his wife was German.
In any event, the two women’s trips proved valuable. Slender, pretty, and blonde, Dr Czaykowska-Medryk wasn’t Jewish, but Catholic, and had written a book about her resistance to Nazism and the life it had brought her in the camps. In February 1943, a month after she arrived in Majdanek, she was on a detail of women who’d been ordered to carry sand and bricks. ‘Overseer Braunsteiner came over with a dog,’ she testified, ‘and made us run by using a whip. She beat us with the whip . . . She had a cape over her uniform and a dog. I remember distinctly because she was the first woman with a dog. It was a police dog, not muzzled, but held on a leash . . . On her command, the dog would jump towards the prisoners.’
Later that month, on a similar detail, she encountered Braunsteiner again: ‘She used the whip and a bat against our legs to make us move faster.’ Braunsteiner, she added, didn’t need whip, dog, or bat to be a brute. She kicked the witness and other inmates so hard and so often with her steel-studded heavy leather boots that they nicknamed her ‘The Mare of Majdanek’.
‘Did you ever see a woman bitten by the dog?’ lawyer Barry asked blandly. No, she hadn’t.
Did she ever see Mrs Ryan kill anyone? To Barry’s usual question, the answer was no. But Dr Czaykowska-Medryk had, in August 1943, seen her help select Jewish women for the gas chambers: ‘On that day, some Polish women were pulling Jewish women away, trying to hide them. Braunsteiner ran to one of those women who wanted to hide a Jewish woman and kicked and beat her.’
Later that August, she saw Braunsteiner grab children and throw them on to two trucks for delivery to the gas chambers. ‘One policewoman refused to help,’ she said, ‘and Braunsteiner hit her across the face.’
The witness testified in Polish, but the INS special inquiry officer, Francis J. Lyons, had difficulty understanding the interpreter’s English, so he sent for another translator and recessed the hearing until after lunch. The delay, the change of translators, and the ominous presence of her one-time tormentor all served to unnerve the Polish woman dentist.
In the afternoon, she was asked whether she could identify Braunsteiner. Pointing to Mrs Ryan, she said: ‘The moment I walked in, I recognized her.’
‘Easy to say,’ Mrs Ryan remarked to her husband.
Hearing that voice after nearly thirty years, the witness turned pale and, after examination by a nurse, was sent home for the day. When the hearing resumed three days later, she was cross-examined by lawyer Barry, who asked her whether she had expressed any concern for the Jewish women in another part of Majdanek.
‘I never asked,’ she answered. ‘Just to ask might bring them closer to death. I was concerned about the few Jews I knew. We were all feeing death together.’
‘Did you hate Jewish women in the field?’ Barry persisted.
‘You are trying to make an anti-Semite out of me!’ she responded indignantly. The most that Barry was able to show ‘against’ her was that she’d been approached to testify by the US Embassy in Warsaw and that she’d said yes without consulting her husband. Great emphasis was placed by the defence on Russell Ryan’s sitting beside his wife at every hearing. The most that Barry was able to show ‘for’ his client was the witness’s labelling Braunsteiner the ‘second cruellest guard’ in the camp. Top ‘honours’, she said, went to a woman named Lotte.
That night, lawyer Barry suffered an attack of bleeding ulcers and the hearings were suspended indefinitely.
When they resumed in early October, the French Dr Lambolez gave a glimpse of Braunsteiner at the peak of her career: as head of her own slave labour camp at Genthin, near Ravensbrück, toward the end of the war. Testifying that she saw her mistreat inmates on many occasions, she said: ‘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.’
‘From October 1972 until March 1973,’ recalls ex-prosecutor Allan Ryan, ‘not a witness was heard, not a day of trial held. The case against the Mare of Majdanek sat on a table in an empty courtroom.’ He described its status as ‘mired’.
At the European end, however, Simon Wiesenthal was slogging through the mire by prodding Polish and German authorities with his evidence, the hearings’ evidence, and hundreds of names of witnesses. On 19 March 1973, Poland asked for Mrs Ryan’s extradition to stand trial for participation in gas-chamber selections of women and children at Majdanek. While Barry’s law firm was arguing that this was political persecution by a communist regime that could not and would not give their client a fair trial, West Germany upstaged everybody two days later by formally issuing a warrant for her extradition as a fugitive accused of murder.
This took the case out of the INS hearing-room in Manhattan and back into federal court in Brooklyn. Mrs Ryan was arrested and spent her first night in jail on Rikers Island in the East River. When she appeared in court at a hearing for bail, she complained that she had ‘slept with prostitutes’. Bail was denied, but she was transferred to the less demeaning Nassau County Jail on Long Island.
Events now moved swiftly and dramatically. The West German warrant, citing nine instances in which ‘Hermine Ryan, née Braunsteiner’ had played a role in murder or torture at Majdanek, and accusing her of taking part in the consignment of as many as a thousand Jews at a time to death in gas chambers, was followed by a three-hundred-page document of depositions detailing her offences. The first ninety-two pages were made public in English translation by US Attorney Robert Morse on 9 April.
‘In the fall of 1942, or the following winter,’ the indictment began slightly fuzzily, ‘the accused hit an unknown female prisoner on her head and body in such a way that she collapsed and died a day or two later because of her injuries.’
During that period, it went on, ‘not only did she push prisoners selected by other SS members into the group destined for the gas chambers, but those who argued for exemption because they were still capable to work were
rendered useless by means of lashes or cuts with the whip.’
In September 1943, swore Maria Kaufmann-Krasowski in a deposition, a Jewish girl tried to escape the gas chamber by pretending she was a Gentile. Braunsteiner knew better – and, to set an example for her other prisoners, ordered a special roll-call. Beneath an improvised gallows, she placed a three legged stool. Then an SS man named Enders led the girl in.
‘On the way to the gallows,’ the witness had testified, ‘I had to translate Enders’ questions . . . as to whether she was aware that she was to be hanged. She answered that she was aware of it. As the noose was slipped around her neck, she turned to the crowd that was forced to watch and said in Polish: “Remember me.”
‘There was a great silence. Then Enders pushed away the stool and hanged the girl. Braunsteiner stood right next to the gallows during this hanging. Then the Germans went away. Somebody threw some flowers on the body, and it was taken away . . . All of us went quietly to our barracks, and in my barracks people were praying.’
Russell Ryan was in court. He embraced his wife whenever she was brought in or taken away. ‘They talk about crimes against humanity and human dignity,’ he declared. ‘I think this entire case is a tremendous outrage.’ He vowed to ‘stick with her to the very end’ and follow her to Germany, if necessary.
He must have read the handwriting on the wall. On 1 May 1973, Federal Judge Jacob Mishler ordered Mrs Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan deported to Germany. In a ten-page decision, the judge ruled that ‘there is competent and sufficient evidence to establish probable cause to believe that Mrs Ryan committed each of the acts charged in the [German] bench warrant.’
Amidst the uproar in the courtroom, investigator Tony DeVito leaped to his feet and called out to INS attorney Schiano: ‘God damn it, Vince, we did it! We made history.’ Lunging to embrace his partner, he suddenly remembered the dignity and seriousness of their roles – and the two men exchanged a solemn, deeply felt handshake.
After the US Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jnr refused to block it, Secretary of State William P. Rogers signed the extradition order at the end of July. On Monday morning, 6 August 1973, Mrs Ryan was taken in handcuffs from her cell at the Nassau County Jail in East Meadow and driven to the federal courthouse in Brooklyn – not for another appeal, but for a final phone call to lawyer Barry. That afternoon, she was driven to Kennedy Airport, where Barry, Russell Ryan, six US marshals (one of them a woman), the counsel of the West German consulate, and a Düsseldorf policeman and policewoman, both in civilian clothes, were waiting. While her husband wasn’t allowed to join her in the departure area, the others spent the next ninety minutes with her in a small, secluded room. Completely composed, Mrs Ryan accepted a Coca-Cola, smoothed her make-up, and chatted briefly in German with her Düsseldorf escorts before remarking to some of the others how funny her native tongue sounded to her now that she hadn’t spoken it for years. Everybody had the tact to refrain from telling her what she already knew – that she would be speaking German for the rest of her life
When a US customs official popped in to ask her to open her luggage for inspection – not the usual procedure for departing passengers – Mrs Ryan, whose hair had been cropped short for the transfer, said: ‘OK, let’s get this over with.’
Her only carry-on baggage was a cardboard carton containing her knitting. As she boarded the Lufthansa flight to Cologne, the US marshals removed her handcuffs so as not to alarm the other passengers and, flanked by the German plain-clothes couple, ‘the Mare of Majdanek’ was kicked out of the United States with far more finesse than any of the exits she had administered.
Upon landing in Cologne the next morning, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan – the first accused war criminal to be expelled from the US to face trial in Germany – was served with a warrant containing twenty-one pages of murder charges from Ravensbrück and Majdanek and then driven directly to Düsseldorf jail.
A year and a half later, in February 1975, she was indicted with nine other Nazis accused of taking a quarter of a million fives in Majdanek. When the Majdanek Trial, as it became known, opened in 1976, she was freed on bail – for she was the only one of the ten defendants in custody. Her bond, the Deutschmark equivalent of 17,000 US dollars, was posted by Russell Ryan, who had moved to Germany to be at his wife’s side.
Ryan raised funds for a futile effort to retain his wife’s Austrian nationality long after she’d relinquished her US citizenship. The defence contested the German court’s jurisdiction because the offences were committed in Poland and she was an Austrian, though both lands were part of Nazi Germany at the time of the crimes and Austrians had become German citizens overnight in 1938. Besides, the court ruled, she had enlisted in the SS in Berlin.
When a professor of international law at the University of Cologne testified on Mrs Ryan’s behalf, Simon Wiesenthal notified the court that the expert’s consultancy fee of 2000 dollars had been paid by the ‘White Power’ movement in the US. When a scholar who had written on SS brutality testified for the prosecution, the defence pointed out that he had done his doctoral work in Berlin under a Jewish professor.
The Majdanek Trial took five years, during which one defendant died of natural causes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Mrs Ryan would commute from the nearby Ruhr Valley industrial city of Bochum, where she and her husband had rented a small apartment. ‘She hasn’t missed a single hearing and is always in the dock on time,’ a court official said admiringly. The defendants sat there, one reporter wrote, ‘like any row of elderly, modestly dressed passengers on a streetcar in a big German city.’
As in America, the defence tactic was two-pronged: to delay a decision (hopefully by boring press, public and judge to death) and to discredit not just the witnesses, but the dead and even the unborn. One of the defence lawyers actually drew a parallel between abortion today and the gassing of children in Majdanek. Another, representing Mrs Ryan, complained that the relentlessness of the testimony against her was a new form of torture.
Simon Wiesenthal attended the trial and called it ‘a circus. A lawyer needs to defend his clients, but not to abuse people. The lawyers are talking to witnesses as though they were criminals. After a Polish lawyer told the court how defendants ordered her to bring the gas to the chamber, the defence lawyers asked the judge to charge her as an accomplice.’
Even in a courtroom circus, however, truth will out – and perhaps the most damaging moment for the defence came when one of its own witnesses, an SS officer, was asked what thoughts went through his head on Friday, 3 November 1943, the day some 18,000 Jews were murdered at Majdanek while he was on duty there. ‘I was thinking about my vacation,’ he replied.
On Tuesday, 30 June 1981, Chief Judge Günter Bogen read his verdicts. One defendant was released because of insufficient evidence. Seven others – including the deputy camp commandant and a woman accused of direct involvement in murdering 1196 prisoners – received sentences ranging from three to twelve years in jail. But Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan was given a life sentence.
She remained impassive. Not her husband, though. ‘American Jews demand these trials,’ Russell Ryan intoned, ‘and this is what happens.’
He didn’t mention the Galician Jew from Vienna who made it all happen. But his wife surely had not forgotten her moment of truth and insight almost seventeen years earlier when she had first learned that Simon Wiesenthal was on her case: ‘This is the end of everything for me.’
PART VI
Bruno Kreisky, Kurt Waldheim
A bad memory is a consequence of a bad conscience.
– Erich Kästner
Memory, which recalls ‘I have done that’, eventually yields to pride, which then argues, ‘I cannot have done that’.
– Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
33
The Jewish Chancellor
In the early 1970s, when a pair of Viennese periodicals ‘quoted’ Bruno Kreisky as saying he was no longer a Jew, Simon Wie
senthal antagonized Austria’s first Jewish Chancellor forever by quipping publicly that ‘the only Austrian who doesn’t believe Kreisky is Jewish is Kreisky himself.’ The barb stung – and, while later lawsuits and denunciations, accusations of ‘Jewish fascism’ and ‘Nazi collaboration’ and besmirching of each other’s past and present involved other issues, the enmity began there. Though Kreisky, at the peak of power, would brand Wiesenthal ‘Public Enemy Number One’, Simon would insist to Kreisky’s dying day that ‘I am not his enemy because I am not a hater, but he hates my guts.’
‘There is nobody in this country who doesn’t know I’m of Jewish birth,’ Kreisky told me when I went to see him in early 1974. ‘And I am happy. Ours was a very happy family . . . I never said “I am no longer a Jew.” The Kurier and profil both printed it and it spread into the world press, but when the Austrian Press Council asked them to produce proof, all they could come up with was two tapes, which didn’t show I said it. So they were reprimanded by the Press Council for “violating the ethical obligations of the press.”’
Since the Austrian Press Council’s censure isn’t binding, neither publication had retracted the misquote or even mentioned the reprimand. I asked Kreisky what he did say.
‘I said “I am an Austrian of Jewish origin. I am not a Zionist.” And I would say this to you today: “I am of Jewish origin and I am not willing to deny this. But I am not a Zionist and never have been a Zionist.” I refuse the thesis that a Jew has to be a Zionist. It is not true.’
When Kreisky insisted that he had ‘never suffered religiously, only politically’ for his religious origins, I pointed out that he had to leave the country in 1938. He replied: ‘Yes, but because I was a Social Democrat. We were in the avant-garde of millions of others. I was arrested by the Gestapo for the first time because I was a Socialist. The Jews were arrested eight months later – in October or November, And they were not the last victims. You know, there were American soldiers who suffered and died, too. All the victims of the war suffered because of Hitler. . .’
