Hermione Braunsteiner-Ryan

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Hermione Braunsteiner

Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan (born July 16, 1919 in Vienna ; † April 19, 1999 in Bochum ) was an Austrian guard in the Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camps . She was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Majdanek trial in 1981 and pardoned in 1996.

Life

Work in the concentration camp

Hermine Braunsteiner's father was a butcher. She received an apolitical and strictly Catholic upbringing and attended elementary and secondary school from 1925 to 1933. Between 1934 and 1939 she worked in a brewery and as a household helper, then at the Heinkel works in Berlin. At the end of the 1930s she lived with a civil servant who convinced her of National Socialism . In 1939 she applied successfully to the Ravensbrück concentration camp due to better pay and working conditions. She began her service there on August 15, 1939 and was trained as an overseer.

Her diligent fulfillment of duty enabled Hermine Braunsteiner to climb the overseer hierarchy quickly. In 1941 she became head of the clothing store in Ravensbrück.

On October 16, 1942, Braunsteiner was transferred to the Majdanek concentration camp in occupied Poland , where her career continued. Half a year later she became the report manager and shortly afterwards deputy to the supervisor Else Ehrich .

Among the inmates, Braunsteiner was considered the cruelest and most brutal guard and was called by them "Kobyla" ("the mare"); she kicked inmates with her iron-shod boots. She was particularly noticeable for her cruel treatment of children who in her eyes were "useless eaters". She punished the children with blows and lashes if they rushed too hastily on the food bucket or if they did not sew their prisoner number on properly. A child had been hidden in a backpack by his father when he arrived at the camp. When it moved, Braunsteiner hit the screaming, crying child with his whip and then drove it into the gas chamber.

In 1943 Braunsteiner received the Second Class War Merit Cross. In January 1944, Braunsteiner was transferred back to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, initially as head of the Genthin subcamp and then as a supervisor. After the camp was closed at the beginning of May 1945, she fled the Soviet troops back to Vienna.

Life after the end of the war and discovery

In 1946 Hermine Braunsteiner was arrested by the Austrian police and handed over to the Allies . She spent two years in internment and prisoner-of-war camps . In 1949 she was sentenced to three years of severe, aggravated prison by the “Regional Court for Criminal Matters in Vienna as a People's Court ” for her acts in Ravensbrück , but was released in the spring of 1950. Your activity in Majdanek played no role in this process. Eight years later she emigrated to Canada with the US soldier Russell Ryan , married him and then moved with him to the United States in the New York borough of Queens . She did not tell her husband or the American authorities about her work in the concentration camps. In 1963, Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan received US citizenship . A year later, however, she was tracked down by Simon Wiesenthal . Extensive press reports and an expatriation procedure followed. In 1971 Braunsteiner-Ryan renounced US citizenship retrospectively and was thus stateless . In 1973 she was arrested in the United States, extradited to the Federal Republic of Germany and was initially held in custody because of the risk of escape.

In 2013 a man in Graz discovered several private documents in his grandmother's legacy, which Braunsteiner-Ryan had sent to her between 1957 and 1973. In a lengthy letter from the US prison dated April 22, 1973, she wrote:

“I owe all of this to my dear friends, the J. and also to the German state, who consider it necessary (due to the enormous pressure and financial power of the popular breed) to want to make me guilty after 34 years, and mine Demand extradition in order to condemn me again for everything that the German state ordered and carried out at that time. "

The historian Martin Cüppers interprets the found documents as follows: Such Nazi careers are driven by “a bundle of motives”. In any case, this included agreeing to the Nazi ideology in all its breadth, especially anti-Semitism .

The Majdanek Trial

In 1975 Braunsteiner-Ryan was indicted in the third Majdanek trial before the Düsseldorf Regional Court along with eight other camp employees. The allegations against Ryan were "community murder in 1,181 cases and accessory to murder in 705 cases".

Hermione Braunsteiner-Ryan showed no emotion or remorse in court . It is reported that she even solved crossword puzzles during the trial . She was very silent most of the time. If she said anything, she denied what had happened. She later cited her lack of life experience as the reason for her actions and described herself as a “little wheel in the gears”. She reported about her time in the camp: "... the whole impression and the whole atmosphere in the camp put a lot of emotional strain on me, I mean as a woman". Braunsteiner-Ryan suffered two breakdowns during the trial. She was released from custody on bail from her husband in 1976, but was remanded in custody in 1977-78 for attempting to intimidate a witness. Because of the expected murder conviction, she was re-arrested in 1979.

The court sentenced Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan to life imprisonment in 1981 . She was convicted on three of nine counts: selection with murder of 80 people, aiding and abetting murder of 102 people ("child action") and selection with collective murder of 1,000 people.

pardon

In 1996, at the age of 77, she was pardoned by Johannes Rau - the then Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia  - because of her poor health .

Others

It is believed that Braunsteiner-Ryan's behavior in the process and partly her story was used by Bernhard Schlink for his fictional character Hanna in The Reader as an inspiration or model.

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ A b Douglas Martin: A Nazi Past, a Queens Home Life, an Overlooked Death . Article in The New York Times , December 2, 2005, accessed April 6, 2019
  2. Thorsten Schmitz: The mare from Majdanek. In Helmut Ortner (ed.): Hitler's shadow - German reportages, ISBN 3-88350-050-X , p. 63.
  3. The Majdanek Trial: "... as if we were cattle" . In: The time . No. 11/1981 ( online ).
  4. my detention
  5. Quoted from Heike Karen Runge, see lit., p. 4f and facsimile p. 7. By “J.” she obviously means “Jews”, as the word “race” shows in context.
  6. Dschungel , supplement to jungle world , No. 7, February 14, 2013, p. 7.