Hermine Braunsteiner
Austrian concentration camp guard (1919–1999)
Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan (July 16, 1919 – April 19, 1999) was an Austrian SS Helferin and female camp guard at Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camps. She was the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States to face trial in West Germany. Braunsteiner was known to prisoners of Majdanek concentration camp as "the Mare" because she was said to have kicked and stomped on prisoners, thrown children by their hair onto trucks that took them to be murdered in gas chambers, hanged young prisoners, and beaten prisoners to death.
Braunsteiner was convicted for her complicity and collaborating in murders of over 1,000 people during the Holocaust. She was sentenced to life imprisonment by the District Court of Düsseldorf on April 30, 1981. She was released on health grounds in 1996, and died three years later.
Early life
Braunsteiner was born in Vienna, the youngest of seven children in a strictly observant Roman Catholic family, variously described as petite bourgeoisie (kleinbürgerlich) or working class. Her father, Friedrich Braunsteiner, was a butcher and a chauffeur for a brewery owner, while her mother was a washwoman and custodian. She was raised under impoverished circumstances in the Nußdorf suburb of Döbling.
Braunsteiner graduated from Hauptschule in 1933 with aspirations to become a nurse.
The public source identifies “Hermine Braunsteiner” as austrian concentration camp guard (1919–1999). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hermine, Braunsteiner and Austrian.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q78615. VIAF identifies the subject as 23039369. The Library of Congress control number is no2001048304. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1919, 1999, 1981 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hermine Braunsteiner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.