The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service has postponed until Monday a hearing scheduled for yesterday on whether Mrs. Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan should be deported because of her Nazi past.
The reason for the delay was apparently the incident last Saturday when a self-styled “Jewish Resistance Assault Team,” seeking to demonstrate against her, firebombed a house with the same street number half a mile away, causing minor damage. The “resistance” group said through an unidentified representative over the telephone to a newspaper that it had no connection with the Jewish Defense League.
Mrs. Ryan, who is married to an American citizen, lost her American citizenship last Sept. 29 for concealing the fact that she had been convicted by an Austrian court in 1949 for torturing and otherwise mistreating women and children at the Ravensbrueck and Maidanek death camps. She was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and confiscation of her property.
The US Justice Department charged she had concealed her former Nazi SS membership in her citizenship application. Mrs. Ryan was located in Queens (a New York City borough) in 1964 by Simon Wiesenthal of the Vienna Documentation Center, who reported her to the US government. If it is found that she still possesses Austrian citizenship, her extradition to Austria will be sought by Wiesenthal so that she can face murder charges there.
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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.
