The Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, marked a turning point in World War II and the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. The following month, in July 1944, Soviet forces liberated Majdanek, the first major Nazi camp in German-occupied Poland to be uncovered.
Only after the liberation of the concentration camps did the full extent of Nazi horrors become known to the world. Forced labor, starvation, and years of mistreatment and torture left surviving inmates resembling skeletons, many barely able to move.
One of the most infamous perpetrators of these atrocities was Hermine Braunsteiner. She was born on July 16, 1919, in Vienna, Austria, the youngest of seven children. Her father Friedrich was a butcher, and her mother Maria worked as a laundrywoman.
The family home was apolitical, marked by good relationships and a strict Catholic upbringing. Between 1925 and 1933 Braunsteiner attended elementary school and then high school. She was a good student who wanted to achieve something, and her dream was to become a nurse.
Financial reasons forced her to give up that dream. After her father died of cancer and her mother stopped receiving annuities, Hermine became the only provider for the family. To improve their situation, she left to stay with her sister in the Netherlands to look for work, but she could not get a work permit and returned to Vienna after only three months.
In the spring of 1938, when Adolf Hitler annexed Austria into the German Reich, Braunsteiner was in England working as a housekeeper for an American engineer. The Anschluss took place over three days, between March 11 and 13, 1938, and was supported by many Austrians who saw it as a reunification with Germany.
Thousands turned out to greet Hitler, the native son returning to his homeland. For Austria's approximately 200,000 Jews, the Anschluss marked a terrible turning point. Beginning on the night of March 11 and in the weeks that followed, pogrom-like violence spread across the country.
Austrian Nazis and others beat, attacked, and humiliated Jews, forcing them to scrub streets, clean public toilets, and perform humiliating exercises. Many decided to try to leave Austria, and lines appeared at consulates across Vienna. When Hitler returned to Berlin, he was greeted as a hero.
The Anschluss was the Nazi regime's first act of territorial aggression and expansion. Although Western leaders saw it as an invasion, no government moved to stop Hitler, who felt free to embark on the next step in his scheme to conquer Europe.
When Braunsteiner returned to Vienna in May 1938, she became a German citizen. For a small salary she returned to work at a brewery where she had briefly worked before leaving for England. Because she had failed to get an education as a nurse, she signed up at the Viennese employment bureau and was assigned to an ammunition factory in Grüneberg, near Berlin, where she began producing bullets in August 1938.
Out of the 16 marks she earned weekly, she paid 5 for rent and spent the rest on a travel ticket to work and on supporting her mother in Vienna. Braunsteiner worked there until August 1939, when, at the age of 19, she applied for the position of supervisor at Ravensbrück concentration camp. The main reason she applied was the money: the salary was 60 marks per week.
Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis. In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, and Roma. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished.
The camp was staffed both by SS men, who served as guards and administrators, and by 150 women who served as supervisors. These female supervisors were either SS volunteers or women who had taken the job for the good pay and working conditions. Ravensbrück also housed a training camp for female SS guards, who were taught how to handle the prisoners they would supervise.
Prisoners would have to work until they died, and the task of supervisors such as Braunsteiner was to extract a maximum amount of work from them while they were still alive. About 3,500 women were trained at Ravensbrück and went on to serve there or at other concentration camps.
Through her eager performance of her duties, Braunsteiner rose rapidly in the overseer hierarchy. From the beginning of 1941 she took over management of the so-called Kleiderkammer, the clothing magazines. In April 1942 Maria Mandl was promoted to senior supervisor at Ravensbrück.
Mandl supervised daily roll calls and punishments such as beatings and flogging, and she also selected women for human experiments. Her duties included overseeing the work assignments of the guards she supervised, among them Braunsteiner. A disagreement with Mandl led Braunsteiner to request a transfer, and in October 1942 she was relocated to Majdanek concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
During its entire existence, the Majdanek camp was under construction. Between April 29, 1942, and November 3, 1943, Jewish prisoners were the overwhelming majority of those registered at Majdanek. The camp also contained storage facilities for clothing and personal items stolen from Jews before their deaths in the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka II killing centers.
Hermine worked in such a storage facility and supervised female prisoners who sorted and repaired clothes. From the beginning of January 1943, she stayed at the female field at Majdanek, where Polish prisoners were directed.
In the winter of 1941–1942, camp authorities began using Zyklon B gas to murder prisoners too weak to work in a makeshift gas chamber. Mass murder operations using poison gas began at Majdanek in October 1942 and continued until the end of 1943.
There appear to have been three gas chambers at Majdanek; at least two were shower rooms reconfigured for Zyklon B. At least one of these two was used to kill human beings. The SS killed tens of thousands of Jews at Majdanek.
The majority arrived as forced laborers and either died from brutally inhumane living conditions or were killed in the gas chambers after the Germans determined they could no longer work. Because of the workload and frequent assemblies, Braunsteiner regularly replaced the main supervisor Elsa Ehrich. She was involved in selections of women and children to be sent to the gas chambers and was almost always present when the gas executions took place.
Majdanek's gas chambers were also used to kill prisoners from other camps in Lublin who were no longer able to work. Some Jewish victims were killed in the gas chambers upon arrival, while many others were killed in shooting operations or died of disease, starvation, exposure, and overwork.
Though it served primarily as a vast forced-labor camp for Polish Jews, Majdanek also served as a detention center for real and suspected members of the Polish underground resistance and for Poles suspected of violating the harsh provisions of the German occupation authorities governing labor discipline. Next to Jews, Poles represented the largest minority in the camp. Other prisoners included Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Soviet prisoners of war and civilians, and a handful of others.
At Majdanek, Braunsteiner showed her superiority toward the prisoners by treating them brutally and inhumanely, using every opportunity to harass and humiliate the women. She became infamous for her wild rages and tantrums, and the women at the camp described her as inhuman, cruel, brutal, and sadistic, causing frantic fear.
Not only did she beat prisoners, but she also killed them by stomping on them with her steel-studded jackboots, which earned her the nickname "The Stomping Mare." Another of her specialties at Majdanek was whipping. She would whip several women, including pregnant ones, to death.
She was particularly notable for her cruel treatment of children, whom she saw as "useless eaters." She would whip children and, on a few occasions, was seen grabbing children by their hair and throwing them onto trucks heading to the gas chambers. She would pull the children's hair so hard that whole tufts remained in her hands.
She punished children with beatings and lashes even if they rushed toward the food bucket or failed to sew their inmate number on correctly. On one occasion, a child had been hidden in a rucksack by his father when they arrived at the camp. As the child moved, Braunsteiner noticed it and whipped the man so hard that the hidden child cried out. She then killed the child on the spot.
In the camp, Braunsteiner was often accompanied by a German shepherd, which she used to bait prisoners. On one occasion she told female prisoners to give up their children because "the children were going to a summer camp where they would get milk two times a day." Because the mothers knew what would happen, they did not want to give up their children. Braunsteiner started hitting one woman with a child so brutally that the woman fell down. The mother and child died on the spot.
After the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began on April 19, 1943, a large part of the surviving Jews were transported to Majdanek. SS female supervisors, including Braunsteiner, and other SS men prevented the children from escaping, beat them, hit them with whips, and captured them again. For her work, Braunsteiner received the War Merit Cross, 2nd class, in 1943.
During the spring of 1944, the SS evacuated most of the prisoners to concentration camps further west. In late July 1944, as Soviet forces approached Lublin, the remaining camp staff hastily abandoned Majdanek. In their urgency to flee, they neglected to destroy most of the prisoners' barracks and the gas chambers.
When the Soviet army liberated the camp on July 24, 1944, it was virtually intact, and only a few hundred Jewish prisoners remained alive. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and the evidence of the horrors that had occurred there. Between 80,000 and 120,000 people perished in Majdanek between October 1941 and July 1944.
When the Soviet army liberated Majdanek, Braunsteiner was already at Genthin, a subcamp of Ravensbrück located outside Berlin. She was the main supervisor of over 14 SS women and the head of the Genthin subcamp. Braunsteiner served there until May 1945.
After the surrender of Genthin camp on May 7, 1945, she escaped from Soviet troops to the western zones of occupation. After the war, survivors testified that she had abused many Genthin prisoners with a horsewhip she carried, killing at least two women with it.
After the war, Braunsteiner worked for three months on a farm in Bavaria, and in October 1945 she returned to her mother in Vienna, where she worked as a housekeeper until January 1946. On May 6, 1946, Austrian police arrested her and turned her over to the British military occupation authorities.
She was held in various internment camps until April 18, 1947, when she was released. On April 7, 1948, Austrian officials re-arrested her because of her activity as a camp supervisor at Ravensbrück. On November 22, she was convicted of abusing prisoners and violating humanity and dignity at Ravensbrück, but acquitted of her crimes at Majdanek due to a lack of witnesses.
Braunsteiner was sentenced to only three years in prison and had her property confiscated. Because detention in the ward and internment center counted toward her sentence, she served only until April 1950, when she was released. She then worked at low-level jobs until the mid-1950s, when she met Russel Ryan, with whom she emigrated to Canada in 1958.
They married, and Braunsteiner took her husband's name, Ryan. They moved to the United States and lived in New York, where Russel worked as a precision mechanic and Hermine in a jersey factory. She told neither her husband nor the American authorities about her work in the concentration camps.
In January 1963, Hermine Ryan-Braunsteiner was granted American citizenship, losing her Austrian one at the same time. A year later, she was tracked down by Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter. The first press release about Hermine as a Ravensbrück and Majdanek supervisor appeared.
Because she had not included this information in her citizenship application, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services initiated action to deprive her of American citizenship. In September 1971, Hermine gave up her American citizenship. When she was arrested in 1973 and expelled to Germany, Russel Ryan told a reporter: "There's no more decent person on this earth than my wife. She wouldn't hurt a fly."
Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan was tried at the Third Majdanek Trial, which lasted from November 1975 until June 1981. During the trial she experienced two mental breakdowns, and there were even reports that she solved a crossword puzzle during proceedings.
During her testimony she pounded her hands against the table and screamed at one witness: "This woman should be telling the truth. I did not shoot any boy." Then, during a break, she insulted another witness, saying: "You, liar, you should be telling the truth."
Braunsteiner tried to diminish her role in the camps, invoking having been merely a small cog in the large wheel of a very powerful state crime apparatus. During the trial she wrote to a friend: "My dear friend, I can 'thank' for all this to Jews and German state, who found it necessary after 34 years to prosecute me and who request my extradition so that I can be again convicted for everything that was back then ordered and carried out by German state."
Braunsteiner said she had never done anything worse than slap some prisoners at Ravensbrück. When asked whether she had done anything during her time at the camps that she was ashamed of, Hermine Braunsteiner, the Stomping Mare of Majdanek, answered simply, "No."
She was convicted on three out of nine counts: the murder of 80 people, abetting in the murder of 102 children, and collaborating in the murder of 1,000 people. On June 30, 1981, the court sentenced her to life imprisonment.
Due to complications of diabetes, including a leg amputation, Braunsteiner was released in 1996. After leaving prison, she lived with her husband Russel in an apartment in the Linden district of Bochum. She spent her last years in a wheelchair, suffering from diabetes and arthritis. She was 79 years old when she died on April 19, 1999. There were no tears shed for Hermine Braunsteiner.