A new film, "The Housewife," which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, recounts the chilling story of Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, a former Nazi death camp guard who lived for decades in Queens, New York, undetected.
Ryan, who worked as an SS guard at the Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camps during World War II, was known for her extreme cruelty. She earned the nickname "the stomping mare" for allegedly killing female prisoners by stomping on them with steel-spiked boots. Reports also indicate she whipped prisoners to death and dragged children by their hair. She was recognized for her brutality with a War Merit Cross.
After the war, an Austrian court convicted Ryan of crimes against human dignity for non-fatal abuse, sentencing her to three years in prison. She was released after serving four months and later moved to the United States in 1959, settling in Queens. She married an American Air Force mechanic and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1963, living a seemingly ordinary life in her New York neighborhood.
Her hidden past was exposed in 1964 when New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld, following a tip from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, approached her home. Upon confronting Ryan, she reportedly responded, "My God. I knew this would happen. You’ve come."
The revelation shocked her neighbors, who knew her as a friendly and hardworking woman. Her husband, Russell Ryan, was reportedly unaware of her wartime atrocities and remained with her.
Despite the exposure, Ryan was not immediately stripped of her citizenship. An investigation led to her citizenship being revoked in 1971, after the government determined she had lied on her application regarding her Austrian conviction. During deportation proceedings in 1972, harrowing testimonies emerged from Holocaust survivors who recounted Ryan's brutality. One survivor described seeing an inmate "clobbered like the seals are clobbered in North America" by Ryan.
Ryan was extradited to West Germany in 1973, becoming the first U.S. citizen to be deported for war crimes. In 1981, she was sentenced to life in prison for her role in the deaths of over 1,000 people at Majdanek. She died in 1999 at the age of 79.
The film, directed by Ben Shirinian and starring Naomi Watts as Ryan, attempts to build suspense by initially suggesting Ryan's husband might be the one with the dark past. However, critics note that Watts' performance makes the protagonist's guilt apparent to viewers early on, potentially diminishing the impact of the film's underlying theme that evil can reside in unassuming individuals.