Who Were The Last Nazis On Trial?

“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
Adam Smith

The doorbell rang on a quiet street in the New York borough of Queens on a spring afternoon in 1964.

When Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan answered, she found herself face-to-face with Joseph Lelyveld, a cub reporter from The New York Times. It was the second doorbell he had rung that day.

“My God, I knew this would happen,” she said. “You’ve come.”

Her husband, Russell Ryan, a construction worker who had met his Austrian wife while stationed in Germany, would later protest his wife’s innocence. “My wife, sir, wouldn’t hurt a fly,” he insisted. “There’s no more decent person on this earth.”

The neighbours who knew the fastidious housewife as a friendly presence on 72nd Street had no idea of the nickname prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp of Majdanek had given Braunsteiner-Ryan two decades earlier: the ‘Stomping Mare’.

Survivors testified that she had trampled prisoners to death with her jackboots, thrown children by their hair onto trucks bound for gas chambers, and selected thousands for execution with casual brutality.

Braunsteiner-Ryan’s discovery came through a remarkable chain of coincidences.

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was dining at a Tel Aviv restaurant when he received a phone call. The maître d’hôtel announcing “phone call for Mr. Wiesenthal” across the dining room led to his recognition by other patrons, who stood and applauded. When he returned to his table, several Majdanek survivors were waiting to tell him about a female guard who had escaped justice.

Following their leads from Vienna to Halifax to Toronto and finally to Queens, Wiesenthal alerted the New York Times, setting in motion events that would make Braunsteiner-Ryan the first Nazi war criminal extradited from the United States.

Her story reveals a fundamental truth about Nazi justice: it has always been incomplete, belated, and often accidental.