In 1964, a reporter knocked on the door of a modest home in Queens, New York. The woman who answered was a housewife, married to an American, a citizen for nearly a decade. Her name was Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan. Twenty years earlier, she had been a guard at Majdanek.
She had disappeared. So had tens of thousands of others. When Allied forces liberated the camps between late 1944 and May 1945, they found not only survivors but also guards who had failed to flee. At Bergen-Belsen, British troops arrived on 15 April 1945 to discover approximately 60,000 prisoners in terrible conditions, and hundreds of SS personnel still present.
Commandant Josef Kramer and dozens of staff members were arrested on site. At Dachau, American soldiers of the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions arrived on 29 April 1945. They found over 30,000 prisoners and roughly 560 SS personnel. Similar scenes unfolded at Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and dozens of other facilities across Germany and Austria.
The scale of the system had been enormous. Historians estimate that around 50,000 men served as SS guards during the war. Several thousand women also worked as overseers, known as Aufseherinnen, at facilities like Ravensbrück and Auschwitz-Birkenau. By May 1945, thousands of these personnel remained in Allied custody, while others had discarded their uniforms and disappeared into the chaos of postwar Europe.
Justice came quickly for some. The Bergen-Belsen trial opened on 17 September 1945 at Lüneburg, just five months after liberation. Forty-five defendants faced a British military court, including Kramer, SS-doctor Fritz Klein, and twenty-two-year-old guard Irma Grese. The trial lasted two months.
Eleven received death sentences. On 13 December 1945, British executioner Albert Pierrepoint hanged Kramer, Grese, and nine others at Hameln Prison. Grese became the youngest woman executed under British law in the twentieth century. The Americans conducted their own proceedings.
The Dachau trials ran from August 1945 to December 1947, prosecuting personnel from Dachau, Mauthausen, Buchenwald and Flossenbürg. Hundreds were convicted. Hundreds more received death or life sentences. All executions took place at Landsberg Prison.
Prosecutors argued that anyone who served at a camp where atrocities occurred shared responsibility for those crimes. Female guards faced prosecution alongside men. Maria Mandl, who had served as chief overseer at Auschwitz-Birkenau, was extradited to Poland and tried before the Supreme National Tribunal in Kraków. On 24 January 1948, she was executed.
But not all female guards were captured. Hermine Braunsteiner, who had served at Ravensbrück and later at Majdanek, slipped out of Austria and into the chaos of postwar Europe. By 1948, she was gone. The early momentum would not last.
As Cold War tensions rose, Allied priorities began to shift. By the end of 1948, the wave of Allied prosecutions had largely ended. The Dachau trials concluded in December 1947. The British and French wrapped up their proceedings soon after.
Across Western Europe, attention turned from punishment to reconstruction. The emerging Cold War reshaped priorities. West Germany, established in May 1949, was now a frontline state against Soviet expansion. Its new leaders wanted stability, not endless reminders of the recent past.
The shift was dramatic. In 1951, the West German government passed amnesty laws that released thousands of convicted war criminals from prison. Many had served only a fraction of their sentences. At Landsberg Prison, where American military courts had sent hundreds of condemned men, clemency boards reviewed cases and reduced sentences wholesale.
By 1955, nearly all the Landsberg prisoners had been freed. Political pressure played a significant role. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s government argued that continued prosecutions threatened social cohesion and complicated rearmament efforts. Veterans’ groups lobbied aggressively for the release of men they called soldiers, not criminals.
The impact extended beyond those already convicted. Across West Germany, prosecutors quietly closed investigations. Denazification tribunals, which had processed millions of cases in the late 1940s, increasingly classified former Nazis as “followers” rather than active perpetrators. The legal category allowed individuals to escape serious consequences.
Former guards who had avoided early prosecution now found themselves largely ignored by a justice system focused elsewhere. Without centralized coordination, cases fell through the cracks of a fragmented judicial system. Many guards simply resumed ordinary lives. They returned to their hometowns, found work in factories and shops, and raised families without consequence.
Some assumed new identities or moved to new cities to avoid recognition. Others did not bother. In the silence of the 1950s, few Germans asked uncomfortable questions about their neighbors’ wartime service. The collective preference was to look forward, not back.
Historians later described this period as one of widespread suppression, a time when perpetrators and bystanders alike chose forgetting over confrontation with the past. A smaller number fled abroad. With forged documents and assistance from sympathetic networks, some former SS personnel escaped Europe entirely. Routes ran through Austria and Italy to South America, where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay offered refuge.
Spain under Franco also sheltered former Nazis. Others reached Syria and Egypt. For lower-ranking guards, emigration often required less dramatic measures. Canada, Australia, and the United States all accepted German immigrants during the 1950s.
Screening procedures varied widely. Some former guards entered legally, their pasts undiscovered or deliberately overlooked by immigration officials eager to fill labor shortages. Hermine Braunsteiner was one of them. In 1959, she arrived in Canada, then moved to New York.
By 1963, she had married an American, obtained citizenship, and was living quietly in Queens. By the mid-1950s, justice for camp personnel had essentially stalled. Then, in 1958, a single trial in a small German city changed everything. In the spring of 1958, a trial opened in the southern German city of Ulm.
Ten former members of an SS and police unit stood accused of participating in the killing of thousands of Jewish civilians along the German-Lithuanian border in 1941. The proceedings revealed something troubling. These men had lived openly in West Germany for over a decade. Some held government jobs.
None had faced serious investigation. The Ulm Einsatzkommando trial exposed how thoroughly the justice system had failed to pursue perpetrators still living within its borders. The response was swift. In December 1958, the justice ministers of West Germany’s eleven states established a new agency in the town of Ludwigsburg.
The Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, known as the Zentrale Stelle, would coordinate investigations across the country. Its mandate was to gather evidence, identify suspects, and refer cases to local prosecutors. For the first time, West Germany had a dedicated institution focused on tracking down those responsible for Nazi-era atrocities. The agency began with a small staff working from a former prison building.
Over the following decades, it would help bring nearly 7,000 individuals to trial. The Zentrale Stelle’s work led to landmark prosecutions. The most significant was the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which ran from December 1963 to August 1965. Twenty-two defendants faced charges for crimes committed at Auschwitz.
The proceedings lasted twenty months and heard testimony from over 350 witnesses. Six defendants received life sentences. The trial forced German society to confront what had occurred in these facilities. It was broadcast on radio and covered extensively in newspapers, reaching millions who had preferred not to know.
Efforts also extended beyond Germany’s borders. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, operating from Vienna, had spent years tracking former perpetrators who fled abroad. In 1964, he received a tip about a woman living in Queens, New York. Her name was Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, the same Hermine Braunsteiner who had served at Ravensbrück and Majdanek.
Survivors later described her as exceptionally brutal, giving her the nickname “the Stomping Mare. ”
Now she was a housewife in America, married to an American citizen, living under her married name. Wiesenthal passed the information to the New York Times. A reporter knocked on her door.
When confronted, she denied everything. But the investigation had begun. In 1971, the United States revoked her citizenship. On 7 August 1973, she became the first Nazi war criminal extradited from America to face trial in West Germany.
The Majdanek trial began in November 1975 and lasted nearly six years. On 30 June 1981, Braunsteiner was sentenced to life imprisonment. She had lived freely for nearly three decades. For decades, German prosecutors faced the same obstacle.
To convict a former guard, they needed evidence of a specific criminal act. Testimony placing someone at a camp was not enough. The defendant had to be linked to a specific act against a named victim. This requirement protected thousands of lower-ranking personnel who had served at facilities where mass atrocities occurred but whose individual actions could not be documented.
Then, in 2011, a case in Munich changed the legal landscape entirely. John Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian-born former autoworker who had lived in Ohio for decades. Evidence indicated he had served as a guard at Sobibor in occupied Poland during 1943. Prosecutors charged him not with specific acts but with being an accessory to the deaths of everyone who perished at the site during his service.
On 12 May 2011, a Munich court convicted Demjanjuk as an accessory to tens of thousands of murders committed during the period he served there. He was sentenced to five years in prison. The verdict established a new precedent. For the first time, a German court ruled that serving at a site built for systematic killing was itself sufficient for conviction.
No evidence of individual criminal acts was required. Demjanjuk died in March 2012 before his appeal could be heard. But the precedent survived. German prosecutors, now armed with a new legal framework, launched investigations into elderly former guards who had escaped justice for seven decades.
The Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg compiled lists of potential defendants still living in Germany and abroad. The race against mortality had begun. The most prominent case that followed was that of Oskar Gröning. Known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” Gröning had served at the Auschwitz complex from 1942 to 1944.
His job was to collect and count money taken from arriving prisoners and send it to Berlin. He had never denied his service and had even spoken publicly about what he witnessed. In July 2015, a court in Lüneburg convicted Gröning, then ninety-four years old, holding him legally responsible as an accessory in the murder of 300,000 people. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
The verdict confirmed that the Demjanjuk precedent would hold. Working at a camp, even in an administrative role, was enough. Additional prosecutions followed. Former guards in their nineties faced charges for service at Auschwitz, Stutthof, and other camps.
Some trials ended before verdicts could be delivered. Defendants died or were declared unfit to stand trial. Critics questioned whether prosecuting elderly individuals decades after the fact served any meaningful purpose. Supporters argued that justice has no expiration date, and that documenting these crimes remained essential for historical memory and future accountability.
Hermine Braunsteiner died in 1999 after sixteen years in prison. Oskar Gröning died in 2018 before serving a single day of his sentence. Between them, they represented the two outcomes for camp guards who faced justice, one caught in time, one caught too late.
Most were never caught at all.
