The quiet street in Maspeth, Queens, was the kind of place where neighbors left their doors unlocked and children played until the streetlights flickered on. On the morning of July 12th, 1964, the Ryan household at 52-17 72nd Street was undergoing a modest renovation, with paint rollers and drop cloths spread across the living room floor. Hermine Ryan, a woman with a thick Austrian accent and a reputation for doting on neighborhood dogs, answered the door in pink striped shorts and a white collarless blouse.
She was holding a paint roller, her face bright with the simple domesticity of a Saturday chore. The man on her doorstep was Joseph Lelyveld, a reporter for the New York Times, who had traveled from Manhattan on a tip that would shatter the facade of this working-class idyll. When he asked if she was Hermine Braunsteiner, former guard at the Majdanek concentration camp, her face froze, the color draining as if she had seen a ghost.
She dropped the roller, the clatter echoing through the quiet house, and ran inside screaming for her husband, sobbing in German, “Dieses Ende, this is the end.”
Russell Ryan, a union electrician who had built his life around the woman he called his angel, came to the door with the unshakeable confidence of a man who believed he knew his wife completely. He had met Hermine years earlier in Austria, where she had told him almost nothing about her past, only that the war years had been difficult and that she had done things she was not proud of. He did not press, accepting her vague explanations as the scars of a continent torn apart by conflict.
When the reporter leveled the accusation of Nazi war crimes, Russell’s response was immediate, visceral, and absolute. “My wife would not hurt a fly,” he declared, his voice steady with conviction. “She’s an angel.
There’s no more decent person on this earth than my wife.” He meant every word, and he would continue to mean it through an investigation, a deportation, a trial that lasted nearly six years, and the testimony of 400 Holocaust survivors who would describe his wife in terms that defied human comprehension. This is not a story about inherited guilt, the kind that haunts the children of perpetrators.
This is a story about what happens when documented atrocity meets unconditional love, and love refuses to see.
The woman Russell Ryan married was a fabrication, a carefully constructed identity that had been built on a foundation of blood and iron. Before she was Hermine Ryan, the dog-loving housewife of Queens, she was Hermine Braunsteiner, known to the inmates of Majdanek concentration camp as the “Stomping Mare,” a nickname earned through her use of heavy jackboots with iron tips. Survivors would later testify that she used those boots to kick prisoners in the stomach, the throat, and the skull, beating women until they stopped moving.
They described her whipping pregnant prisoners to death and tearing children from their mothers’ arms, throwing them onto trucks bound for the gas chambers. She arrived at Ravensbrück concentration camp on August 15th, 1939, just two weeks before Germany invaded Poland, a 20-year-old woman volunteering for a role that would define her life. By the time she transferred to Majdanek in October 1942, she had been promoted to a position of authority, overseeing selections that determined who would live and who would die.
The testimony was consistent across hundreds of witnesses, painting a picture of a woman who did not simply follow orders but volunteered for brutality with an enthusiasm that shocked even seasoned prosecutors.
One survivor described watching Hermine discover a child who had been hidden by his mother during a selection. She beat the boy until he whimpered, then dragged him by his hair to the trucks heading for the gas chambers while the mother screamed in agony. Hermine kept walking, her iron-tipped boots clicking against the ground as if she were on a casual stroll.
This was the woman Russell Ryan married, not the warm-hearted neighbor who cooed over puppies, but the mayor of Majdanek, a title given to her by the prisoners who witnessed her daily cruelty. The evidence of her crimes was not hidden in archives or buried in unmarked graves; it was etched into the memories of hundreds of survivors who would spend decades trying to forget the sound of her boots. Yet Russell Ryan, the simple man from Queens who had found a good woman, could not reconcile this reality with the image of the wife who painted their living room lilac and yellow.
He chose to believe the fabrication, and that choice would define the rest of his life.
What makes Russell’s denial even more difficult to understand is the fact that Hermine had already been convicted of war crimes once before. In November 1949, an Austrian court found her guilty of her actions at Majdanek, and she served three years in prison before being released in April 1950. Then, in 1957, she received a partial amnesty that effectively erased her record, at least on paper.
This clean slate allowed her to immigrate to Canada, where she met and married Russell, and eventually to become an American citizen. Russell either did not know about the Austrian conviction, or he knew and did not care. Either possibility raises the same haunting question: what did he think happened during those years she would not discuss?
She had told him the war years were difficult, that she had done things she was not proud of, but he never pressed for details. He accepted her vague explanations as the trauma of a generation, never imagining that the woman who baked cookies for neighborhood children had once selected which prisoners would be sent to the gas chambers. The cognitive dissonance required to maintain this belief would grow only more extreme as the evidence mounted against her.
By the late 1960s, the evidence against Hermine had become impossible for the US government to ignore. The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal had tracked her to Queens, and the investigation that followed would strip away the layers of her American identity. The US government stripped her citizenship in 1971, and two years later, on August 6th, 1973, she was deported to Germany to stand trial.
Russell posted $17,000 in bond, drove her to the airport, and watched her board a Lufthansa flight while she wept. Then he went home to Queens and waited, his faith in her innocence unshaken by the mounting evidence. The third Majdanek trial began on November 20th, 1975, in Düsseldorf, and it would last 474 days, making it the longest Nazi war crimes trial in German history.
The prosecution assembled 100 accordion files containing 20,000 pages of evidence, and 400 witnesses would testify against the defendants. The trial cost 20 million German marks, a staggering sum that reflected the gravity of the proceedings. Russell attended twice a week, flying to Germany and sitting in the gallery wearing his dark blue corduroy cap, his hair graying, watching his wife sit in the defendant’s dock.
Hermine’s behavior during the trial was remarkable in its detachment. While survivors described her crushing skulls with iron-tipped boots, she sat knitting, reading American newspapers, and working crossword puzzles. She seemed utterly disconnected from the proceedings, as though the testimony had nothing to do with her.
Only occasionally did she react, and when she did, it was with flashes of the anger that had defined her wartime behavior. When one survivor described the hidden child, the boy Hermine had beaten and dragged to his death, she pounded the table and shouted, “Diese Frau soll die Wahrheit sagen. This woman should tell the truth.”
She had two mental breakdowns during the trial, both times forcing proceedings to be suspended while she recovered, and both times she returned to her knitting as if nothing had happened. Russell heard all of it, every description of torture, every account of murder, every survivor who pointed at his wife and said, “That woman killed my mother, my child, my sister.” He believed none of it, retreating further into a reality of his own construction.
The court heard 400 witnesses and reviewed 20,000 pages of evidence, but none of it penetrated Russell Ryan’s alternate reality. He did not simply ignore the evidence; he actively rewrote it, telling reporters that his wife had been forced to serve as a guard and that she was wrongly convicted. He insisted that 400 Holocaust survivors had coordinated their lies to frame an innocent woman, a conspiracy theory that required him to believe in a level of coordination that defied logic.
This was not simple denial, which might manifest as a refusal to think about the evidence. Russell’s position required something far more elaborate, a complete reconstruction of history that could withstand the weight of overwhelming counter-evidence. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning, the tendency to process information in ways that support conclusions we have already reached.
But even motivated reasoning has limits, and most people confronted with enough contradictory evidence eventually adjust their beliefs. Russell never adjusted, maintaining his fiction with a stubbornness that bordered on the pathological.
The trial lasted nearly six years, and the verdict came on June 30th, 1981. Of the nine defendants, Hermine was the only one sentenced to life imprisonment, with the others receiving sentences of three to twelve years. The court found that her crimes were uniquely severe, that she had demonstrated particular cruelty and particular enthusiasm for violence.
Russell’s response was not acceptance but deeper commitment, a doubling down on his belief in her innocence. In her final statement to the court, Hermine said, “I carry guilt, but I am no murderer. Only I and God know this is the truth.”
Russell chose to believe her, and he would keep believing her for the rest of his life. For two decades after the verdict, he maintained his vigil, visiting Hermine regularly at Mülheimer Women’s Prison and later at the Frenenburg Justice Hospital. He collected signatures from their old neighbors in Queens, trying to build evidence of her good character, and he told anyone who would listen that Germany had stolen his wife.
Meanwhile, Hermine deteriorated, her untreated diabetes eventually requiring the amputation of her left leg below the knee.
She sewed stuffed animals for pocket money and exercised alone, kept isolated from other inmates, whether for her protection or theirs, the records do not say. The man who had watched 400 survivors testify spent 20 years maintaining that every single one of them had lied. There is something almost heroic about that kind of commitment, if you do not think about what it required him to ignore.
Russell Ryan loved his wife more than he loved the truth, more than he loved the memory of the dead, more than he loved his own sanity. Whether that is devotion or delusion depends entirely on what you believe love is supposed to be. In April 1996, German authorities released Hermine on medical grounds.
She was 76 years old, severely diabetic, and missing a leg. State Minister Johannes Rau granted the pardon despite objections from prosecutors, who argued that the victims still suffer psychologically. But the law saw a dying old woman who posed no threat, and she was released to the care of her husband.
Russell brought her home, not to Queens, but to a 65-square-meter apartment in Bochum-Linden, Germany, a state-subsidized unit in an evangelical nursing home complex. After 35 years of fighting, this was their reward, a small apartment, a government subsidy, and whatever time they had left. Six months later, in December 1996, a German journalist found them, and the image he captured has haunted those who have seen it ever since.
Russell was pushing his wife across a wet marketplace in a wheelchair. She was legless, arthritic, draped in a pale blue terrycloth bathrobe and a green-and-red plaid blanket. Her white hair was flattened against her head, and her hands were folded in her lap.
He would stop at vendor stalls and ask which flowers she would like, but she never responded. He would hold up a blue pair of pants, showing her, consulting her preferences, and she would stare straight ahead, silent. The vendors called out greetings to Herr Ryan, who came every week, methodically selecting groceries, always asking his wife’s opinion first, always deciding alone when she offered no answer.
After decades of insisting on her humanity, of telling the world she was an angel, a victim, an innocent woman wrongly accused, Russell Ryan was now caring for someone who could no longer confirm or deny anything. The woman he had defended no longer existed in any meaningful sense; she was a body in a wheelchair, staring at nothing. He gave her insulin injections every day and never left her alone for more than an hour.
A volunteer caregiver who had worked with them for 12 years said she had never seen anyone more devoted. All those years of defense, all those years of denial, and this was what it had purchased, the privilege of pushing a silent woman through a German marketplace, asking her questions she would never answer. Did Russell Ryan ever accept the truth?
Everything we know suggests he did not. In their final years together, he still called her a victim of German justice. “Germany has taken my wife from me,” he would say, as though she had been kidnapped rather than convicted by a court that heard 400 witnesses.
Hermine died on April 19th, 1999, at 79 years old, in the Bochum-Linden Nursing Home. Russell survived her and continued to maintain her innocence until his own death. They had no children, no one to carry the guilt, the shame, or the questions forward.
Hermine was the youngest of seven siblings, but her six brothers and sisters vanished from the historical record entirely, leaving no trace of their fates. The family of Hermine Braunsteiner was, in the end, just one man, a man who chose to believe a fiction and who may have carried that fiction to his own grave. The question is not whether she was guilty; 400 witnesses answered that, the evidence answered that, and the court that convicted her answered that.
The question is what it means that someone could love her anyway, and what that love required him to unsee. Judge Günter Bogen, who presided over part of the trial, said something in 1996 that continues to resonate: “I will not come to terms with this verdict for the rest of my life.” He was talking about the difficulty of judgment, the weight of sentencing a human being to life in prison even for monstrous crimes.
But Russell Ryan carried something heavier, not the weight of judgment but the weight of refusing it, the weight of looking at documented evil and choosing to see an angel instead. Maybe that is what love does to some people; maybe it blinds them so completely that 400 witnesses become liars, 20,000 pages of evidence become conspiracy, and a woman who crushed children’s skulls becomes a victim. Or maybe Russell Ryan knew the truth all along and simply could not bear it, the fiction being the only thing that kept him alive.
We will never know, as he took the answer with him to the grave. All that remains is the image of an old man pushing a wheelchair through a wet German marketplace, asking his silent wife which flowers she would like today. The neighbors in Maspeth who remembered the Ryans as the kindest couple on the block would later struggle to reconcile their memories with the revelations that followed.
They remembered Hermine stopping to pet every dog she saw, cooing in German, and Russell standing proudly beside her, a simple man who had found a good woman.
The house at 52-17 72nd Street still stands, a modest row house in a neighborhood that has changed with the decades, but the story of what happened behind its walls has become a cautionary tale about the limits of love and the power of denial. The survivors who testified against Hermine Braunsteiner spent their lives carrying the trauma of her cruelty, and many of them lived to see her convicted and imprisoned. But they also lived to see a man who insisted they were all liars, a man who attended their testimony and dismissed it as fabrication.
For the survivors, Russell Ryan’s denial was a secondary wound, a reminder that even the most documented atrocity could be dismissed by someone who loved the perpetrator. The trial in Düsseldorf was a landmark in the pursuit of justice for Nazi war crimes, but it also 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 the uncomfortable truth that justice does not always bring closure. For every survivor who found some measure of peace in the verdict, there was Russell Ryan, standing in the gallery, shaking his head in disbelief.
The legacy of Hermine Braunsteiner is not just the horror of her crimes but the complexity of the human response to those crimes. She was a woman capable of unspeakable cruelty and also of inspiring a devotion so profound that it defied all reason. Her husband’s love was real, as real as the iron-tipped boots she wore at Majdanek, and that juxtaposition is almost impossible to process.
How can the same woman who cooed over puppies and painted her living room lilac and yellow also have beaten children to death? The answer, perhaps, is that human beings are capable of compartmentalizing their lives in ways that defy understanding. Hermine Braunsteiner may have genuinely loved her husband and her dogs while also having committed atrocities that stagger the imagination.
Russell Ryan may have genuinely loved his wife while also having chosen to ignore the evidence of her crimes. Both of them lived in worlds of their own construction, worlds that could not coexist with the reality documented in court records and survivor testimony.
The story of Hermine Braunsteiner and Russell Ryan is a story about the stories we tell ourselves, the fictions we construct to make life bearable, and the costs of those fictions. For Russell, the cost was his own sanity, his own connection to reality, and his own moral compass. He spent the last decades of his life caring for a woman who had become a shell of her former self, pushing her through a marketplace and asking questions she would never answer.
He died maintaining her innocence, a final act of devotion that raises more questions than it answers. Was he a victim of his own love, a man so blinded by affection that he could not see the truth? Or was he complicit in her crimes, a man who chose to look away because looking away was easier than confronting the horror?
The answer is probably both, and neither, and the ambiguity is what makes this story so haunting.
The trial of Hermine Braunsteiner was a landmark in the history of war crimes prosecution, but it also highlighted the limits of the law in addressing the full scope of Nazi atrocities. The court could convict her of her crimes, but it could not force her husband to acknowledge them. It could sentence her to life in prison, but it could not undo the damage she had done to the survivors and their families.
The 400 witnesses who testified against her did so with the hope of achieving some measure of justice, but many of them left the courtroom feeling that justice was an inadequate response to the horrors they had witnessed. Russell Ryan’s denial was a reminder that even the most compelling evidence could be dismissed by someone who was determined not to believe it. The survivors had to live with the knowledge that their testimony had been heard by a man who dismissed it as lies, and that knowledge added another layer of pain to their already unbearable burden.
The story of Hermine Braunsteiner and Russell Ryan also raises questions about the nature of evil and the capacity for love to coexist with it. Hermine was a woman who committed atrocities that defy comprehension, but she was also a woman who inspired a devotion that lasted until death. Russell was a man who loved his wife unconditionally, but that love required him to ignore the suffering of hundreds of people.
The juxtaposition of these two realities is almost impossible to process, and it forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that human beings are capable of both great love and great evil, sometimes in the same person. The story of the Ryans is a story about the limits of human understanding, the fragility of memory, and the power of denial. It is a story that has no easy answers, only questions that continue to haunt those who encounter it.
As the years pass, the story of Hermine Braunsteiner and Russell Ryan has become a case study in the psychology of denial and the complexity of human relationships. It has been examined by historians, psychologists, and journalists, each of whom has tried to make sense of a story that defies easy explanation. But perhaps the most compelling aspect of the story is the image of Russell Ryan pushing his wife through that wet German marketplace, asking her which flowers she would like.
It is an image of devotion and delusion, of love and denial, of a man who chose to see an angel where the world saw a monster. It is an image that captures the tragedy of a life built on a lie, and it is an image that will continue to resonate for generations to come. The story of what happened to Hermine Braunsteiner’s family after World War II is ultimately a story about the human capacity for self-deception, and the lengths to which we will go to protect the ones we love, even when the truth is staring us in the face.