The Nazi Woman Who Hid in Queens for Years
It’s a summer morning in Queens, New York, 1964. A young reporter from The New York Times is standing on a residential street in Maspeth, a quiet, tidy neighborhood of low brick houses and trimmed hedges. The kind of place where people hang their laundry on lines and wave to each other from front stoops.
His name is Joseph Lelyveld. He’s not yet famous. He’s been given an address by his editor and told to find a woman named Ryan. He rings a doorbell. A woman answers. She is in her mid-40s, compact, unassuming. She might be anyone’s neighbor. She might be anyone’s wife. And she is She is the wife of Russell Ryan, an American construction worker who met her abroad and brought her home and had absolutely no idea.
Or so he would later say. Lelyveld tells her who he is. He tells her why he is there. And she looks at him not with shock, not with denial. She looks at him with something closer to resignation. And she says, “My God, I knew this would happen.” You come. That sentence. Hold on to it.
Because that sentence tells you everything. Not that she was caught off guard, not that she was innocent and confused, but that she had been waiting. For 20 years, she had been living in this house, on this street, in this borough, going to the grocery store and watering the garden and making dinner and watching the news.
And somewhere underneath all of it, she had been waiting for that knock. Her name was Hermine Braunsteiner. She had been, during the Second World War, a guard at two of the Nazi concentration camp system’s most brutal installations, Ravensbrück and then Majdanek in occupied Poland. Prisoners there knew her by a different name.
They called her Kobyla. In German, die Stute. The mare. They called her that because of what she did with her boots. If you are new here, this is what we do on this channel. We find the people the history books summarize in three lines. We find out what they actually did. We find out what happened to them.
And we do not look away. Now, let’s get into this. Plume. Vienna. 1919. Hermine Braunsteiner is born on the 16th of July in the Neustift suburb of Hütteldorf, a working-class district on the northern edge of the city, a long way from the coffee houses and concert halls that Vienna likes to show to the world.
She is the youngest of seven children in a Roman Catholic family that does not have much. Her father, Friedrich, is a butcher who also works as a chauffeur for a brewery owner. Her mother is a washerwoman and building custodian. They are, depending on which historian you read, lower working class or the very bottom rung of the petite bourgeoisie.
It amounts to the same thing. They are a family that is always one illness, one lost job, one bad year away from real poverty. Hermine grows up in that precariousness. She is, by all accounts, a reasonably capable student. She graduates from her secondary school in 1933, the same year Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany, though that fact sits in the background for now, not yet front and center in her life.
She wants to be a nurse. That aspiration is not unusual for a girl of her time and class. It is respectable work. It involves care. It is a path toward something. But her father dies in 1934, and with that, the path closes. She is 15 years old and the family needs income. Nursing school becomes an impossibility.
She takes what she can find, domestic service, maid work, cooking and cleaning for other people’s households. She spends the next several years moving through a succession of these positions, mostly in Vienna with one brief stint in the Netherlands staying with relatives. In 1937, she gets what might seem like a significant opportunity, a position working in London in the household of an American engineer.
She is there for about a year. She learns something of the world beyond Austria. Then comes the Anschluss, March 1938. Hitler’s Germany absorbs Austria in what is presented not as conquest, but as reunion. Heimins Reich, home into the Reich. And Hermine Braunsteiner, now 19 years old, comes home. She is afraid that if war breaks out between Britain and Germany, she could be interned as an enemy national.
So she leaves London and returns to a country that is no longer Austria in any meaningful sense. It is now the Ostmark, a province of the Third Reich. She tries again to get into nursing training. The Blauschwesternschaft in Berlin turns her down. So she takes a job at a munitions factory in Grünberg, then moves to Berlin to work at the Heinkel Aircraft Works.
She is 20 years old. She is working on airplane components in a factory. She is nobody’s idea of a monster. And here’s the moment. This is the hinge point, and it is so ordinary that it might slide past you if you are not paying attention. Her landlord, a police officer from the nearby town of Fürstenberg, mentions in casual conversation that the concentration camp that has recently been established nearby at Ravensbrück is hiring female supervisors, Aufseherinnen.
The work pays 64 Reichsmarks per week. 64 marks. That is four times what she is currently earning at the aircraft factory. She applies. She is accepted. She begins her training on the 15th of August, 1939, 17 days before Germany invades Poland and the world goes to war. This is the moment that history turns on.
Not ideology, not fanaticism, not the search for power or the hunger for cruelty. A pay rise. Four times the money. I want you to sit with that. Because it is the most unsettling thing in this entire story, and this story contains some extraordinarily unsettling things. She did not apply to guard a concentration camp because she believed in a cause.
She applied because she was 20 years old and poor, and the money was better. What happened next is what she chose to do with the job once she had it. Ravensbrück concentration camp, northern Germany, August 1939. The camp has been open for only a few months. It has been built specifically for women, the Reich’s largest such facility, on the edge of a lake 90 km north of Berlin in a landscape that is obscenely beautiful.
It is designed to imprison women classified as enemies of the state, political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma women, those deemed asocial, a category broad enough to mean almost anything the regime wanted it to mean. Hermine Braunsteiner trains here under Maria Mandel, one of the most feared women in the entire camp system. She receives service number 38, meaning she is among the earliest intake of guards.
She stays at Ravensbrück for 3 years. We know she abused prisoners during this period. We know she beat women. We know she killed at least two women at the later Genthin subcamp using a horsewhip she carried. A French physician imprisoned at Genthin witnessed her personally administer 25 lashes with a riding crop to a young Russian girl suspected of sabotage and then refused to allow the doctor to treat the wounds immediately.
But Ravensbrück is not where the name Kobyla is born. That comes later. That comes from Majdanek. Squib. Majdanek. Let me tell you what this place was. It sits on the outskirts of Lublin in German-occupied Poland. It is established in late 1941. And unlike many of the camps the Third Reich operates, Majdanek is both a forced labor camp and an extermination camp simultaneously, in the same location, at the same time. It has gas chambers.
It has crematoria. It has a permanent workforce of prisoners being worked and starved to death, and a machinery of murder operating alongside them. The SS runs selections, that bureaucratic euphemism for the process of sorting newly arrived human beings into those who will work and those who will die today.
Historians estimate that at least 78,000 people were murdered at Majdanek. 60,000 of them were Jewish. They were killed by Zyklon B gas, by carbon monoxide, by mass shooting. And then there is November 3rd, 1943. Operation Harvest Festival, Aktion Erntefest. The SS and police units assembled at Majdanek and two nearby camps, and in a single day they shot approximately 18,000 Jewish men, women, and children at Majdanek alone.
Music was played through loudspeakers to drown out the screaming and the gunfire. Across the three locations over 2 days, more than 42,000 people were killed. 42,000 in 2 days. The smoke from Majdanek could be seen from miles away by the residents of Lublin. They could smell it. Hermine Braunsteiner arrives at Majdanek in October 1942.
She is 23 years old. By January 1943, she has been promoted to assistant wardress, Oberaufseherin’s deputy in the women’s section. And this is where the testimony begins. Because survivors remember her. They remember her specifically. In a place defined by horror, she’s remembered by name. She participates in selections.
She stands in the yard and she looks at the women and the children who have just arrived and she decides, this group, the gas chambers. This group, the labor block. She does this personally and repeatedly. She beats prisoners, not as an instrument of official punishment, though official beatings happen, too, but with what survivors describe as genuine, almost recreational ferocity.
She beats women with a whip. She beats them until they cannot stand. She beats them until they are not standing at all. She beats a group of starving children with a ladle because they arrived too early for food distribution. She earns her nickname, Kobyla, the mare, because of what she does with her boots. Her jackboots are fitted with metal studs and she uses them.
She stamps on prisoners. She kicks them until they stop moving, until they are dead. Multiple survivors testify to having witnessed this. Multiple survivors testify to specific incidents. A woman on the ground, the boots coming down, the sound of it. One witness at her later trial in Düsseldorf described an incident that I will tell you about now and I want you to understand that this is a documented survivor account entered into evidence in a court of law.
A prisoner had smuggled her child into the camp hidden inside a backpack. The child was small enough barely to be concealed in this way. Braunsteiner noticed movement in the backpack. She pulled the child out. She whipped the child for several minutes and then she personally dragged that child to the gas chamber.
I need to stop here for a second. A child hidden in a backpack and Hermine Braunsteiner, a woman who wanted to be a nurse, who went to church, who made dinner for her husband in Queens, she whipped that child and walked her to the gas chamber personally. If you are watching this and do not yet subscribe, this is what this channel exists to do. This is the story.
This is why it matters. Subscribe. I’ll be here. There is more testimony. A witness spoke of Braunsteiner seizing children by their hair, grabbing them physically by their hair and throwing them onto the trucks that transported prisoners to the gas chambers, not ordering someone else to do it, doing it herself with her own hands.
She is noted by every surviving account for her particular hatred of children. She calls them Unnutzefrasser, useless eaters. She punishes them for minor infractions, for wearing stockings for warmth against the Polish winter, for incorrectly sewing their prisoner numbers onto their clothing. She is present at hangings. There is documented testimony that she personally provided the stool on which a girl stood before she was hanged on an improvised gallows.
For all of this, for the beatings, the selections, the gas chamber transports, the whippings, the boots, the Third Reich rewards her in 1943 with the War Merit Cross, second class. She receives a medal. She wears it. In January 1944, as the Soviet Red Army begins its advance and Majdanek prepares to evacuate, Braunsteiner is transferred back to Ravensbrück, promoted to supervising wardress of the Genthin subcamp outside Berlin.
She is there until the end. On May 7th, 1945, the day Germany surrenders, she flees ahead of the Soviets and returns to Vienna. The war is over and she is 25 years old and she is alive. Vienna, 1946, then nothing. The Allies are prosecuting the major architects of the Third Reich at Nuremberg. They will hang 11 men in October 1946.
The world watches the trials on newsreels and reads about them in the papers and believes, wants to believe, that justice is being done, that the scales are being balanced. What almost no one fully appreciates at the time is the scale of what is not being prosecuted. Majdanek alone had hundreds of SS personnel.
Ravensbrück had hundreds of female guards. Across the entire Nazi camp system, there are tens of thousands of people who participated directly in murder, in torture, in selections for the gas chambers. And the vast majority of them are simply going home. Austrian police arrest Braunsteiner in May 1946.
She is held for about a year, then rearrested by Austrian officials in 1948. In November 1949, the Austrian People’s Court in Graz convicts her, not of murder, not of the crimes at Majdanek, but of crimes against human dignity for non-fatal abuse at Ravensbrück. A lesser charge. A conveniently narrower charge.
Her crimes at Majdanek, the selections, the children, the boots, are not prosecuted because the court says there are insufficient witnesses available. She is sentenced to 3 years. With time already served, she walks out of prison after 4 months. 4 months and she is told, officially told, that she will face no further prosecution in Austria.
In 1957, she is granted partial amnesty. It is important to understand what is happening here. This is not an accident. This is not merely incompetence. Austria in the late 1940s is in the business of moving forward, of reconstruction, of building a national identity that positions Austrians as Hitler’s first victims rather than his enthusiastic collaborators.
The machinery for genuinely prosecuting Nazi-era crimes is deliberately limited. The will to look backward is deliberately suppressed. Braunsteiner gets 4 months for what she did, then she is free. She works in hotels and restaurants in Carinthia. She keeps her head down. She meets Russell Ryan, an American Air Force mechanic stationed in Germany, and they fall in love, or something that functions as love, and in October 1958, they marry in Nova Scotia, Canada.
She enters the United States in April 1959. On the 19th of January, 1963, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, former wardress of Majdanek, the mare, the woman with the boots, raises her right hand and swears the oath of American citizenship. She becomes a naturalized American citizen. She is living in Maspeth, Queens. She has a house.
She has a husband who works construction and tells the neighbors she is the most decent person he has ever met. She mows the lawn. She does the grocery shopping. She is, to all outward appearances, a housewife. For 4 years, she is an American citizen and no one in the American government knows or has chosen to look at what she did between 1939 and 1945.
17 years. From the end of the war to Joseph Lelyveld’s doorstep in 1964. 17 years of ordinary life bought with a few months in an Austrian prison and the complicity of two governments that did not want to look too hard. That is what institutional failure looks like. Not a single dramatic collapse, but 17 years of small decisions to prosecute the minimum, to narrow the charges, to grant amnesty, to look forward rather than backward, that add up to a woman who stomped prisoners to death growing tomatoes in Queens. But
the story of how Hermine Braunsteiner is found begins, of all places, in a Tel Aviv restaurant. Simon Wiesenthal is in Israel on one of his trips. He is already by 1964 one of the most dedicated Nazi hunters in the world, an Austrian-born Jewish survivor who lost 89 members of his family in the Holocaust and who has dedicated his life to ensuring that the perpetrators are named, found, and prosecuted. He is having lunch.
His dining companion cannot make it and sends a message. And when the Matla Dane announces the call for Mr. Wiesenthal, something unexpected happens. The other diners recognize him. They stand and applaud. And when Wiesenthal returns to his table, several Majdanek survivors are waiting for him. They tell him about a woman, a guard. Kobyla.
They remember her name, Braunsteiner. They tell him what she did. They tell him they believe she is still alive and somewhere in the world unpunished. Wiesenthal begins his investigation. He traces her from Vienna to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Toronto and then, via the paper trail of her marriage and immigration records, to Queens, New York.
In 1964, he contacts the New York Times. He believes she is living somewhere in the Maspeth area under the name Ryan. He asks them to find her. The Times assigns the story to Joseph Lelyveld, 26 years old and relatively new to the paper. He goes to Queens. He rings the second doorbell he tries and Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan opens the door and says the words that will define the rest of her life, “My God, I knew this would happen.
You’ve come.” The story runs on July 14th, 1964 under the headline, “Former Nazi camp guard is now a housewife in Queens.” America is stunned. Not because a Nazi war criminal is living in the country, it will later emerge that there are many, but because this is what she looks like, a a housewife in Queens, a woman with a friendly manner and a tidy house, and a husband who tells reporters his wife wouldn’t hurt a fly.
“There’s no more decent person on this earth,” Russell Ryan says. “She told me this was a duty she had to perform. It was a conscriptive service.” But the legal machinery, once set in motion, is slow, agonizingly slow. It is not until 1968, 4 years after the Time story, that American authorities seek to revoke her citizenship on the grounds that she had failed to disclose her prior war crimes conviction when she applied.
The denaturalization process drags on until 1971. She enters a consent judgment rather than fight deportation. Her American citizenship is stripped. In the meantime, in 1972, vigilantes, not the authorities, not the law, but private citizens, inflamed by the ongoing coverage, firebomb a house in Queens, the wrong house.
They have the wrong address. Braunsteiner is not there. Nobody in that house is harmed, but it speaks to the raw fury that her continued presence in America has generated years after her exposure. Then, in 1973, West Germany formally requests her extradition, accusing her of joint responsibility in the deaths of 200,000 people.
It is a number that, when you look at Majdanek’s full death toll and the system in which she operated, is not an exaggeration. On the 22nd of March, 1973, she is taken into custody and held at Rikers Island, then at Nassau County Jail. She does not go quietly. Her legal team fights every step, that her denaturalization was invalid, that the charges are political offenses committed outside Germany’s jurisdiction, that the case amounts to double jeopardy given her Austrian conviction. Every claim is rejected.
The court finds that she was a German citizen at the time of the crimes, acting as a German government official in the name of the German Reich. On August 7th, 1973, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan boards a plane in handcuffs. She becomes the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States.
At the extradition hearings in Queens, survivors testify. They sit in an American courtroom and they describe whippings and fatal beatings. One witness, Rachel Berger, stands out among the testimony. She is alone in stating that she would celebrate retribution against the woman sitting across the courtroom, not forgiveness, not reconciliation, retribution.
The trial in Düsseldorf begins on November 26th, 1975. It will run for 474 sessions, 5 and 1/2 years. It becomes the longest, most expensive trial in West German history. 16 defendants from Majdanek are in the dock. The world’s press calls it the Majdanek trial. Braunsteiner sits through it all.
She has two recorded screaming fits in the courtroom. She accuses witnesses of lying during breaks in proceedings. She never shows remorse, not once. At one point, she attempts to intimidate witnesses. She is remanded back into custody in December 1977 for this. I want to know what you think about this.
A woman who was convicted of non-fatal abuse in Austria in 1949 and served 4 months, 4 months, is now on trial for murdering children. Is 4 months of imprisonment and 24 years of comfortable civilian life, including American citizenship, something that can ever be retroactively addressed by a prison sentence? Or is justice, when it comes this late, always going to feel like it lands in the wrong century? Drop your answer below.
I read every single one. On June 30th, 1981, the District Court of Düsseldorf delivers its verdict. The court finds insufficient evidence on six counts. On three remaining counts, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan is convicted of the murder of 80 individual prisoners, abetting the murder of 102 children, and collaborating in the murder of a thousand people.
In total, her culpability in over 1,180 deaths is legally established. And those are only the deaths that could be proven beyond reasonable doubt before a court of law, with witnesses elderly and scattered, with records destroyed, with the perpetrators long since rehearsed in denial. The sentence is life imprisonment.
It is the most severe punishment handed down to any of the Majdanek defendants. Spurscht, she is 61 years old. She goes to Mülheimer women’s prison. Russell Ryan, her husband, remains in contact. He visits. He stands by her. Whatever he knew, whatever he refused to know, he does not leave her.
He posts her bail during the trial. He flies to Germany. He is, throughout all of it, present. Then, in 1996, her health collapses. Diabetes takes her leg. A leg amputation is performed, and the German courts rule that she is too ill to remain imprisoned. She is released on medical grounds after serving 15 years of a life sentence. She is 76 years old.
She dies on April 19th, 1999, in a nursing home in Bochum, Germany. She dies quietly in a bed with no public ceremony, no reckoning, no moment of acknowledged responsibility. The world barely notices. A notice in the New York Times, published 6 years after her death, carries the headline “A Nazi past, a Queens home life, an overlooked death.
” Overlooked. That word is doing an enormous amount of work in that headline. There is one legacy worth naming. In the aftermath of her extradition case, the United States government establishes, in 1979, the Office of Special Investigations, a dedicated unit within the Department of Justice tasked with identifying, denaturalizing, and deporting Nazi war criminals who have taken refuge in the United States.
The creation of this office is directly traceable to the Braunsteiner Ryan case. She is the precedent. She is the reason the machinery eventually exists. The first case becomes the template for every case that follows. Here is what I keep coming back to. She wanted to be a nurse. That detail will not leave me.
Not because it excuses anything. It does not excuse anything, not even an atom of it. But because it insists on being understood. Hermine Braunsteiner did not enter the world preformed as a monster. She entered it as a girl from a poor family who lost her father young and had to work to survive and wanted, in some uncomplicated way, to take care of people.
She wanted to be a nurse. And then, the world she lived in offered her a different path, a path that paid four times as much, that came with a uniform and authority and status and the implicit approval of the most powerful state in Europe. And she took it. And once she was inside that path, she did not merely comply with her orders, she exceeded them. She invented cruelties.
She brought something to the work that no job description required. This is the question that haunts every study of perpetrators. Not the sadists, not the ideologues, not the true believers who burned with conviction, but the ordinary ones. The ones who started from nothing particularly monstrous and arrived somewhere unimaginable.
What happened in the space between? Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil, the idea that great crimes can be committed not by demons, but by ordinary people who stop asking moral questions, who learn to treat their cruelties as administrative functions, who replace conscience with procedure. Braunsteiner is not quite that case.
The testimonies make clear that she was not merely procedural. She was enthusiastic. She had screaming rages. She beat children with a ladle for arriving early to the food line. That is not bureaucratic compliance, that is something personal. But the pathway to her particular horror begins with economic precarity, a totalitarian system that made cruelty a career option, and a series of individual choices that were never forced on her.
She was not conscripted into the Aufseherinnen. She applied. She trained. She stayed. She was given a medal, and she accepted it. And then she came to Queens and mowed the lawn and waited for the knock that she always knew was coming. There are also the institutions to consider. Austria’s justice system in 1949 gave her 4 months.
America’s immigration system in 1963 gave her citizenship without asking the right questions. These are not minor administrative oversights. These are the infrastructure of impunity. The reason the knock took 20 years to come is not because Hermine Braunsteiner was clever. It is because the systems that should have been looking were, in various ways and for various reasons, choosing not to look.
The post-war world needed to rebuild. It needed people to go back to work and start families and pay taxes and believe in the future. The full reckoning with what had happened, who had participated at what scale and what ways, would have been overwhelming to confront all at once. So, the world did what people and institutions often do with overwhelming things.
It confronted the minimum and called it justice. The Nuremberg trials prosecuted the architects. The concentration camp system had hundreds of architects, but it had hundreds of thousands of workers, and most of those workers went home. Some of them went to Queens. Some of them went to South America. Some of them remained in their hometowns and collected pensions and watched their grandchildren grow up.
Bronsteiner Ryan’s extradition in 1973 did not close this chapter. It opened it. The Office of Special Investigations that her case made possible would go on to identify and denaturalize hundreds of individuals in the United States. The Majdanek trial made clear that the Federal Republic of Germany was willing to prosecute its own officials decades after the fact.
Other trials followed. Other names surfaced. But, here is the hard truth that this story forces you to hold. We never get all of them. We never get full justice. The math will never balance. 18,000 people in a single day at Majdanek. A lifetime sentence served for 15 years. 4 months in 1949 for what she did to children. The numbers do not close.
What we can do, what the people who testified in Queens and then in Düsseldorf were doing, what Simon Wiesenthal did, what Joseph Label did by knocking on that door is insist on the names. Insist on the specificity. Refuse to let it dissolve into abstraction. 18,000 people, that’s not a statistic.
That is 18,000 individual human beings who had a lost morning, a lost meal, a lost thought. And they deserve to be counted, not summarized. That is what testimony is for. That is what this channel is for. Atipia, go back to that doorstep in Maspeth. Summer 1964. Joseph Label rings a bell and a woman answers and says she knew this would happen.
That sentence is the whole story compressed into 11 words. She knew. She had always known. The crimes did not vanish because she moved to Queens. The children she threw onto those trucks did not become less real because she was now making dinner on 72nd Street. The past is not somewhere you can leave.
It follows you to the doorbell. She spent 36 years after the war. She spent 15 of them in a German prison. She died in a nursing home aged 79 with one leg in a city where no one much noticed. But, I want to end not with her. I want to end with Rachel Berger. Rachel Berger was a survivor of Majdanek who came to testify at the extradition hearings in Queens in 1973.
Every other witness, when asked, spoke in measured terms what they saw, what they remembered, what they could prove. Rachel Berger was the only one who said, plainly and without apology, that she would celebrate retribution against the woman in the dock. Not forgiveness. Not understanding.
Not the measured language of the courtroom. Celebration. She had survived Majdanek. She had survived whatever came after. She had lived her life with what she had seen in it. And when they put her in front of a camera and a microphone and a judge, she did not pretend to feel anything other than what she felt. She told the truth. That is what courage looks like sometimes.
Not the sword and shield version. The version where you stand in a room and name what was done to you and refuse to make it comfortable for anyone. Rachel Berger, remember that name. This story connects directly to the broader world of Nazi hunters and the men and women who built careers out of refusing to let perpetrators disappear.
In particular, the story of Simon Wiesenthal himself, who tracked Bronsteiner’s trail from a restaurant in Tel Aviv, and who, in his own life, represents one of the most extraordinary acts of sustained moral will in the 20th century. His story contains its own complications, its own moral ambiguities, and some questions that are genuinely unresolved.
That is the next story. The story doesn’t end here. It never does. Subscribe if you haven’t. I’ll see you in the next one.
