A Duesseldorf magistrate is to begin the cross-examination next week of Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, extradited in total secrecy from New York Monday night, in connection with the mass-murder of Jews at the Lublin-Maidanek concentration camp during World War II. Mrs. Ryan was secretly spirited out of the U.S. after Secretary of State William P. Rogers signed an extradition warrant.
A court in Duesseldorf issued a warrant for her arrest on April 6, 1973, and the West German Foreign Office applied to the U.S. authorities for her extradition the same month. On Nov. 22, 1949, a court in Vienna acquitted Mrs. Ryan of the same charges, as full evidence was not available, but sent her to prison for three years after finding her guilty of cruelty to inmates of the Ravensbruck concentration camp.
After her release she left Europe for Canada with her husband Russel Ryan and lived in the U.S. Much of the material incriminating Mrs. Ryan came from Simon Wiesenthal, head of the Nazi Documentation Center in Vienna.
The 54-year-old Queens housewife is believed to be the first person accused of war crimes to be extradited from the United States to face criminal charges in West Germany. Mrs. Ryan was 20 years old in 1939 when she became a guard at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany. She was transferred to a death camp at Maidanek near Lublin, Poland in 1942, and returned to Ravensbruck two years later. She is alleged to have sent about 2000 Jewish women and children to the gas chambers, to have killed a woman prisoner, and to have helped in the hanging of a Jewish girl.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
