The Nazi Hunters (36 page)

The woman speaking to Wiesenthal grew more and more agitated as she described one incident. “I’ll never forget that child, the child . . . a small child, you know,” she started. When a prisoner carrying a rucksack on his back had walked by, Braunsteiner lashed the rucksack with
her whip. A child hidden in it cried out. As Braunsteiner ordered the man to open the rucksack, the child jumped out and started running. “But Kobyla ran after it, grabbed it hard so it screamed, and fired a bullet through . . .” The woman’s words gave way to sobs.

Her companions quickly joined in with other horror stories. When new transports arrived, mothers would cling to their young children as the trucks arrived to take them to the gas chambers. Braunsteiner physically tore them apart. Along with two other women guards who were equally brutal, she made a special point of terrorizing young girls. “She struck them with her whip right across their faces, preferably across their eyes,” one of the women recalled. It wasn’t enough to send these girls to the gas chambers; Braunsteiner and her fellow guards were intent on tormenting them first.

The Red Army reached the Polish city of Lublin and liberated Majdanek in July 1944, and in late November the SS guards and staff who were captured were put on trial, resulting in eighty convictions. After his talk with the women in Tel Aviv, Wiesenthal checked to see if Braunsteiner was among them; she wasn’t. But he learned that she had been arrested in the southern Austrian state of Carinthia in 1948, and then put on trial in Vienna for her brutal treatment, including kicking and whipping, of women prisoners when she was a guard at Ravensbrück, another concentration camp. Her service at Majdanek was only briefly mentioned. She was sentenced to “a mere three years’ imprisonment,” Wiesenthal noted.

That meant that Braunsteiner had to have been released more than a decade earlier, and Wiesenthal was determined to see if he could find her. Her last known registered address was in Vienna in 1946, so he decided to check if her former neighbors knew anything about her current whereabouts. The first neighbor he approached slammed the door in his face when he explained who he was looking for. But another neighbor, an elderly woman who had known the family, quickly volunteered that she could not believe the charges that were leveled against Braunsteiner, who she remembered as a young girl who was always “prettily dressed” when she was walking to church on Sundays. The woman did not know
where Braunsteiner had gone after she was released, but she did know the names and addresses of some of her relatives in Carinthia.

Recognizing that he was unlikely to be trusted by Braunsteiner’s relatives, Wiesenthal turned for help to one of the young Austrians who had recently come to his office to volunteer his services. Richard, as he called him, freely admitted he came from an anti-Semitic family and his father had been killed in action in 1944, fighting for the Third Reich. But Richard was convinced his father would not have approved of mass murder. It was no accident that several such young people offered their help to Wiesenthal after the Eichmann trial had heightened awareness of the Holocaust. “People like Richard give people like me the assurance that there was a purpose in surviving and in remaining in Austria,” Wiesenthal noted.

Richard traveled to Carinthia and, following Wiesenthal’s plan, managed to ingratiate himself with Braunsteiner’s relatives. He told them that an uncle of his had been unfairly convicted and sentenced to five years, which prompted the relatives to say that Braunsteiner was a similar case. He soon learned that, after she was released from prison, “Kobyła” had married an American and moved to Halifax. From an Auschwitz survivor in that Canadian city, Wiesenthal learned that Braunsteiner and her husband, a Mr. Ryan, had recently moved again, this time to Maspeth in Queens, New York.

Wiesenthal knew that up to that time the United States had not tried or extradited any Nazis who had settled there. As a result, he could safely assume that she was still there—or that she could still be tracked. At that point, he decided to pass what he had learned to Clyde A. Farnsworth, a correspondent for
The New York Times
who had recently written a profile of him headlined “
The Sleuth with 6 Million Clients.” Farnsworth promptly relayed the tip to his home office.

The editors on Times Square assigned the story to Joseph Lelyveld, a freshman general assignment reporter.
His recollection is that the message he saw included the information that Hermine Braunsteiner, now known as Mrs. Ryan, lived in the blue-collar neighborhood of Maspeth but did not include an exact address. Wiesenthal claimed he had provided
the address. In any case, Lelyveld knew he was supposed to locate “a notorious death camp guard and convicted war criminal,” as he put it, following up on the tip from “the renowned Nazi hunter in Vienna.”

Since he did not know the first name of Braunsteiner’s husband at that point, Lelyveld wrote down all the Ryans listed in the Queens phone book with Maspeth addresses. He expected to have a long day ringing doorbells, but the first Mrs. Ryan immediately knew who he was looking for when he asked about a woman with the same last name who had come from Austria. That would be the woman with a German accent who was the wife of Russell Ryan, she informed him. The couple lived nearby, at 52-11 72nd Street, she added helpfully.

Lelyveld knocked on the door, and there she was. “Mrs. Ryan, I need to ask about your time in Poland, at the Majdanek camp during the war,” the reporter told her.

“Oh my God, I knew this would happen,” she replied, sobbing. It was “as if she’d expected me,” Lelyveld recalled.

He stepped into a living room that was “extremely tidy in a German way, with doilies and cuckoo clocks and Alpine scenes.” Sitting opposite her, he listened to her “weepy, self-pitying narrative” where she protested her innocence. It was a brief conversation but produced a dramatic story headlined: “
Former Nazi Camp Guard Is Now a Housewife in Queens.”

Crediting Wiesenthal for the discovery, Lelyveld noted that Braunsteiner had served a prison sentence in Austria but had denied that she had ever been convicted of a crime when she came to the United States in 1959.

In the article that ran on July 14, 1964, he offered a vivid description of their short encounter:

A large-boned woman with a stern mouth and blond hair turning gray, she was wearing pink and white striped shorts with a matching sleeveless blouse.

“All I did is what what guards do in camps now,” she said in heavily accented English.

“On the radio all they talk is peace and freedom,” she said. “All right. Then 15 or 16 years later why do they bother people?

“I was punished enough. I was in prison three years. Three years, can you imagine? And now they want something again from me?”

Lelyveld reached Russell Ryan later by phone. “My wife, sir, wouldn’t hurt a fly,” he said. “There’s no more decent person on this earth. She told me this was a duty she had to perform.” But he also admitted to the reporter that his wife had never told him until then that she had been a concentration camp guard and had served a prison sentence already.

Not telling her husband about her past was one thing, but lying to the Immigration and Naturalization Service was another. Lelyveld wrote in his piece that an INS official had said that this could prompt a review of her citizenship, but that “he indicated that such reviews rarely result in the withdrawal of citizenship.”

It would take seven years to prove that official wrong.
After long legal battles, Braunsteiner was stripped of her citizenship in 1971. Both Poland and West Germany had sought her extradition, prompting her to declare her willingness to go to West Germany because she feared she would be treated far more harshly in Poland. Sent to West Germany in 1973, she became the most famous defendant in the trial of Majdanek personnel that opened in Düsseldorf two years later; the proceedings dragged on until 1981, resulting in a life sentence. In 1996, she was released for health reasons and sent to a nursing home where her American husband, who never abandoned her, was already living. She died in 1999.

For Lelyveld, his story about her was a singular event, and he never followed up on it. On the same day that he returned from Maspeth, he learned that his father, Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, had been beaten in Mississippi, as the Freedom Summer turned violent. The young reporter was soon busy covering the race riots that were taking place and then sent to Africa in the fall. He was on his way to becoming a star reporter, editor, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author. From 1994 to 2001, he ran the
Times
as its executive editor, the top editorial job in that storied institution.

Sitting in a coffee shop near his apartment on the Upper West Side
in early 2014, Lelyveld appeared genuinely startled when I alluded to the fact that his piece on Braunsteiner, the result of a quick trip to Maspeth, precipitated the first serious stirrings of interest in the wider story of Nazis in the United States. Hadn’t he known about the wider impact of his article for a long time? “Not till right now,” he said.

• • •

Eli Rosenbaum despises the term “Nazi hunter,” since he is convinced that a combination of popular fiction, in novels and films, and misleading or distorted information in media reports and books has imbued the term with mythological connotations. And, as in most myths, fiction usually trumps the facts that inspired the myths in the first place. But, as much as he may cringe when he is categorized as America’s leading Nazi hunter, Rosenbaum fits the bill. He has dedicated most of his life to tracking down Nazis in the United States, seeking to strip them of their citizenship and get them to leave the country either by deportation or, when a deal is struck, voluntarily. Of course, “voluntarily” is not the most accurate term either, since the Nazis are always acting under duress—the intense pressure that he and others in the Justice Department have applied to make them do so.

Rosenbaum’s exploits prompted Alan Elsner, a veteran Reuters correspondent, to make him the model for his hero in his 2007 suspense novel
The Nazi Hunter
. The main character channels the real Rosenbaum’s feelings when he ruminates:

To this day, I still get a kick out of those words, Nazi hunter! They summon images of fearless adventurers tracking down ruthless Gestapo torturers to fortified jungle hideouts in South America. If only it were even a little like that. The truth is much less glamorous. I’m an attorney, not an adventurer, not a secret agent, not even a private investigator. I wear dark suits and sober ties. I spend my days in archives going through microfilm, and in meetings, and occasionally in courtrooms. The Nazis I deal with—far from being dangerous warlords—usually turn out to be gray little men in their seventies or eighties leading dull, anonymous lives in the suburbs of Cleveland or Detroit.

Of course Elsner’s Mark Cain, his name for the fictional version of Rosenbaum, then proceeds to have the kind of fantastic life-and-death adventures that build on the popular image of Nazi hunters that the real Rosenbaum dismisses as nonsense.

Born in 1955 of Jewish parents who fled Germany in the late 1930s, Rosenbaum grew up in the Long Island town of Westbury. While he and his classmates read
The Diary of Anne Frank
in junior high school, the Holocaust received nothing like the attention that it would as he grew older. He knew that many members of his family in Europe had not survived, but it was not a topic that his parents ever wanted to discuss. “
The fact that it wasn’t spoken of in my house actually told me how serious a subject it was, that it was too painful to be addressed,” he recalled.

But Rosenbaum began to get glimpses of the subject that his parents would not discuss. When he was about twelve, he watched Peter Weiss’s
The Investigation,
the reenactment of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial that was performed on Broadway and then broadcast by NBC, on his black-and-white TV. “That’s when I learned for the first time what happened in the concentration camps,” he noted. “And I was shocked, deeply shocked.” One particularly vivid memory: the testimony of a Polish Catholic woman about the grotesque medical experiments performed on her leg. “I was just stunned,” he added. A couple of years later, he read Wiesenthal’s
The Murderers Among Us
, which made him realize how many of the perpetrators had gone unpunished—and he was shocked again.

When he was about fourteen, an unexpected revelation from his father made all of this more personal. The two of them were driving from Long Island to upstate New York, where his father had some business meetings planned and then they were going to ski. Slowed by a blizzard on the New York Thruway, his father resumed a favorite pastime, telling his son about his Army adventures during the war. He had served initially in North Africa and then transferred to the psychological warfare branch of the 7th Army in Europe, which desperately needed German speakers. He had told Eli about how they would string loudspeakers near the front lines and exhort the German troops to surrender, assuring them that they would be well treated. He also recounted tales of boxing for his unit,
and the one time he got drunk with his buddies—which seemed more to amuse than anger his commanding officer.

But on that trip upstate, his father may have run out of the familiar stories—and he abruptly told Eli something that he had never heard before. “You know, I was at Dachau the day after its liberation,” he said. By then, Eli knew what Dachau was. His father was not part of the unit that liberated Dachau, but he was nearby and word had quickly spread that something terrible had happened there. Ordered with another soldier to go check out the camp and report back, he had done so. At that point in the story, Eli wanted to know the answer to the obvious question: what did his father see when he got to the camp?

The snow was coming down hard at that moment. “It was scary driving, it was a blizzard,” Eli recalled. “So we’re both locked on the road in front of us and I’m waiting for an answer and I don’t hear anything.” He looked over at his father and saw that his eyes had filled with tears, his mouth appeared to be trying to say something but no words came out. Finally, after a long pause, his father began talking about something else. “I got it,” Eli said, echoing his reaction to his parents’ previous avoidance of such subjects. “The fact that it was so devastating that he couldn’t speak about it told me what I needed to know.”