Nazi Hunter (65 page)

He must have read the handwriting on the wall. On 1 May 1973, Federal Judge Jacob Mishler ordered Mrs Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan deported to Germany. In a ten-page decision, the judge ruled that
‘there is competent and sufficient evidence to establish probable cause to believe that Mrs Ryan committed each of the acts charged in the [German] bench warrant.’

Amidst the uproar in the courtroom, investigator Tony DeVito leaped to his feet and called out to INS attorney Schiano: ‘God damn it, Vince, we did it! We made history.’ Lunging to
embrace his partner, he suddenly remembered the dignity and seriousness of their roles – and the two men exchanged a solemn, deeply felt handshake.

After the US Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jnr refused to block it, Secretary of State William P. Rogers signed the extradition order at the end of July. On Monday
morning,
6 August 1973, Mrs Ryan was taken in handcuffs from her cell at the Nassau County Jail in East Meadow and driven to the federal courthouse in Brooklyn – not
for another appeal, but for a final phone call to lawyer Barry. That afternoon, she was driven to Kennedy Airport, where Barry, Russell Ryan, six US marshals (one of them a woman), the counsel of
the West German consulate, and a Düsseldorf policeman and policewoman, both in civilian clothes, were waiting. While her husband wasn’t allowed to join her in the departure area, the
others spent the next ninety minutes with her in a small, secluded room. Completely composed, Mrs Ryan accepted a Coca-Cola, smoothed her make-up, and chatted briefly in German with her
Düsseldorf escorts before remarking to some of the others how funny her native tongue sounded to her now that she hadn’t spoken it for years. Everybody had the tact to refrain from
telling her what she already knew – that she would be speaking German for the rest of her life

When a US customs official popped in to ask her to open her luggage for inspection – not the usual procedure for departing passengers – Mrs Ryan, whose hair had been cropped short
for the transfer, said: ‘OK, let’s get this over with.’

Her only carry-on baggage was a cardboard carton containing her knitting. As she boarded the Lufthansa flight to Cologne, the US marshals removed her handcuffs so as not to alarm the other
passengers and, flanked by the German plain-clothes couple, ‘the Mare of Majdanek’ was kicked out of the United States with far more finesse than any of the exits she had
administered.

Upon landing in Cologne the next morning, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan – the first accused war criminal to be expelled from the US to face trial in Germany – was
served with a warrant containing twenty-one pages of murder charges from Ravensbrück and Majdanek and then driven directly to Düsseldorf jail.

A year and a half later, in February 1975, she was indicted with nine other Nazis accused of taking a quarter of a million fives in Majdanek. When the Majdanek Trial, as it became known, opened
in 1976, she was freed on bail – for she was the only one of the ten defendants in custody. Her bond, the Deutschmark equivalent of 17,000 US dollars, was posted by Russell Ryan, who had
moved to Germany to be at his wife’s side.

Ryan raised funds for a futile effort to retain his wife’s Austrian nationality long after she’d relinquished her US citizenship. The defence contested the
German court’s jurisdiction because the offences were committed in Poland and she was an Austrian, though both lands were part of Nazi Germany at the time of the crimes and Austrians had
become German citizens overnight in 1938. Besides, the court ruled, she had enlisted in the SS in Berlin.

When a professor of international law at the University of Cologne testified on Mrs Ryan’s behalf, Simon Wiesenthal notified the court that the expert’s consultancy fee of 2000
dollars had been paid by the ‘White Power’ movement in the US. When a scholar who had written on SS brutality testified for the prosecution, the defence pointed out that he had done his
doctoral work in Berlin under a Jewish professor.

The Majdanek Trial took five years, during which one defendant died of natural causes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Mrs Ryan would commute from the nearby Ruhr Valley industrial city
of Bochum, where she and her husband had rented a small apartment. ‘She hasn’t missed a single hearing and is always in the dock on time,’ a court official said admiringly. The
defendants sat there, one reporter wrote, ‘like any row of elderly, modestly dressed passengers on a streetcar in a big German city.’

As in America, the defence tactic was two-pronged: to delay a decision (hopefully by boring press, public and judge to death) and to discredit not just the witnesses, but the dead and even the
unborn. One of the defence lawyers actually drew a parallel between abortion today and the gassing of children in Majdanek. Another, representing Mrs Ryan, complained that the relentlessness of the
testimony against her was a new form of torture.

Simon Wiesenthal attended the trial and called it ‘a circus. A lawyer needs to defend his clients, but not to abuse people. The lawyers are talking to witnesses as though they were
criminals. After a Polish lawyer told the court how defendants ordered her to bring the gas to the chamber, the defence lawyers asked the judge to charge her as an accomplice.’

Even in a courtroom circus, however, truth will out – and perhaps the most damaging moment for the defence came when one of its own witnesses, an SS officer, was asked what thoughts went
through his head on Friday, 3 November 1943, the day some 18,000 Jews
were murdered at Majdanek while he was on duty there. ‘I was thinking about my vacation,’ he
replied.

On Tuesday, 30 June 1981, Chief Judge Günter Bogen read his verdicts. One defendant was released because of insufficient evidence. Seven others – including the deputy camp commandant
and a woman accused of direct involvement in murdering 1196 prisoners – received sentences ranging from three to twelve years in jail. But Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan was given a life
sentence.

She remained impassive. Not her husband, though. ‘American Jews demand these trials,’ Russell Ryan intoned, ‘and this is what happens.’

He didn’t mention the Galician Jew from Vienna who made it all happen. But his wife surely had not forgotten her moment of truth and insight almost seventeen years earlier when she had
first learned that Simon Wiesenthal was on her case: ‘This is the end of everything for me.’

A bad memory is a consequence of a bad conscience.

– Erich Kästner

Memory, which recalls ‘I have done that’, eventually yields to pride, which then argues, ‘I cannot have done that’.

– Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

33

In the early 1970s, when a pair of Viennese periodicals ‘quoted’ Bruno Kreisky as saying he was no longer a Jew, Simon Wiesenthal antagonized Austria’s first
Jewish Chancellor forever by quipping publicly that ‘the only Austrian who doesn’t believe Kreisky is Jewish is Kreisky himself.’ The barb stung – and, while later lawsuits
and denunciations, accusations of ‘Jewish fascism’ and ‘Nazi collaboration’ and besmirching of each other’s past and present involved other issues, the enmity began
there. Though Kreisky, at the peak of power, would brand Wiesenthal ‘Public Enemy Number One’, Simon would insist to Kreisky’s dying day that ‘I am not his enemy because I
am not a hater, but he hates my guts.’

‘There is nobody in this country who doesn’t know I’m of Jewish birth,’ Kreisky told me when I went to see him in early 1974. ‘And I am happy. Ours was a very happy
family . . . I never said “I am no longer a Jew.” The
Kurier
and
profil
both printed it and it spread into the world press, but when the Austrian Press Council asked
them to produce proof, all they could come up with was two tapes, which didn’t show I said it. So they were reprimanded by the Press Council for “violating the ethical obligations of
the press.”’

Since the Austrian Press Council’s censure isn’t binding, neither publication had retracted the misquote or even mentioned the reprimand. I asked Kreisky what he
did
say.

‘I said “I am an Austrian of Jewish origin. I am not a Zionist.” And I would say this to you today: “I am of Jewish origin and I am not willing to deny this. But I am not
a Zionist and never have been a Zionist.” I refuse the thesis that a Jew has to be a Zionist. It is not true.’

When Kreisky insisted that he had ‘never suffered religiously, only politically’ for his religious origins, I pointed out that he had to leave the country in
1938. He replied: ‘Yes, but because I was a Social Democrat. We were in the avant-garde of millions of others. I was arrested by the Gestapo for the first time because I was a Socialist. The
Jews were arrested eight months later – in October or November, And they were not the last victims. You know, there were American soldiers who suffered and died, too. All the victims of the
war suffered because of Hitler. . .’

In the beginning, there was detachment, distancing, and deflection – shifting the martyrdom to GIs in very much the way others may think they dilute the Holocaust by
noting that Gentiles and gypsies and good Germans perished, too. All this was quite remarkable for a man who lost his mother’s brother’s family to the gas chambers, another uncle to
suicide after the Anschluss, and many other relatives to the Nazi camps. In the end, there would be denial (never denying that he is Jewish, but never acknowledging that he was endangered by being
a Jew) and deception (not just self-deception). When I read my 1974 conversation with Kreisky to Wiesenthal in 1987, Simon snorted: ‘Kreisky is an illusionist. Jews were arrested as Jews from
the day Hitler was coming to Austria. He got out only because he had friends who were Nazis.’

Here, Wiesenthal was referring to Kreisky’s first jailing (in 1935–6) as a Socialist by the home-grown ‘Christian Corporate State’ of Dollfuss and his successor,
Schuschnigg. From 1933 to 1938, under Austro-fascism, socialists, communists, and Nazis were all looked upon as enemies of the state. Thus, Kreisky found himself sharing a cell with a Nazi named
Sepp Weninger and a communist named Auerhahn. They didn’t argue politics. They addressed each other as ‘Friend’, not ‘Comrade’ or anything else. They shared gifts of
food from their families. They complained about the same miseries and, when they talked about the long sentences they faced, Weninger said he’d be freed when Hitler came. Auerhahn said
Hitler’s failures would surely pave the way for Stalin. Kreisky sat silent, comforting himself with the hope that his Social Democrats would be around to pick up the pieces.

‘Hitler was the biggest danger,’ Kreisky told me in our 1974 interview, ‘not just because he boasted that the Jews must be destroyed. This was only a symptom of a general
political ideology
and we Socialists always said: “Fascism is starting as a civil war and will end as a world war.” In captivity in 1934, the most disturbing note
was that many Kreisky met – Nazis, communists, guards, and the professional criminals who ran the jail – seemed to blame their problems on the Jews. Even a few of the imprisoned
socialists did.

Of the three cellmates, Weninger underwent the strictest surveillance, for the ‘illegal Nazi’ was not only politically suspect, but under strong suspicion of having been behind a
bombing attack. He was allowed no visitors or other contact with the outside world. Once, when Kreisky was being visited, Weninger asked him to smuggle out a message to his lawyer about where some
incriminating evidence was that should be destroyed. The information was written on a cigarette wrapper. As Kreisky entered the reception area, he saw that the guards were making thorough body
searches, so he swallowed the cigarette paper – and saved Weninger’s life.

In 1938, when Kreisky was jailed by the Gestapo for five and a half months, some of his Nazi fellow inmates from two years earlier were now his guards – and Kreisky acknowledges in his
memoirs that they eased the pain of prison life for him in 1938 and may even have played a role in his release. When the transports to Dachau began, he was on the shipment list several times, but
Sepp Weninger kept crossing him off every posted roster until he was released on condition that he leave the country.