The feature film “The Housewife,” starring Naomi Watts and directed by Ben Shirinian, premiered this week at the Toronto International Film Festival. The drama explores the true history of Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, a notorious Nazi death camp guard who lived undetected in Maspeth, Queens, for years before finally being caught.
From Concentration Camp Warden to Quiet Queens Homemaker
Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan presented herself to her neighbors as a sweet, hardworking, and ideal American homemaker. Behind that suburban exterior, however, lay a brutal past as an assistant warden at Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Born in Vienna, Austria, she worked initially as a servant and in a brewery before moving to Berlin in the 1930s to embrace rising Nazism, as the outlet reported. Needing money, she applied for a job at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in Germany in 1939 and subsequently transferred to Majdanek in Poland in 1942.
Prisoners at Majdanek gave her a bone-chilling nickname: the stomping mare,
earned because she killed female inmates using steel-spiked boots. Survivors and historical records documented her extreme cruelty, noting that she whipped prisoners to death and dragged children by the hair. For her brutality, the regime awarded her the War Merit Cross. Following the war, an Austrian court convicted her of crimes against human dignity for non-fatal abuse, lacking sufficient evidence for her murders, and sentenced her to just three years in prison. She served just four months before her release for time served.
Immigration, Marriage, and the 1964 Doorstep Confrontation
After resuming normal life, Ryan worked at a hotel in 1957 where she met Russell Ryan, an American Air Force mechanic. The couple married in Canada in 1958 and moved to Queens in 1959, where she gained acceptance and popularity in her neighborhood. By 1963, she received her American citizenship. Her hidden past remained undisturbed until New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld arrived at her Maspeth door in 1964, operating on a tip from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
Confronted on her own doorstep, the former guard acknowledged her identity immediately. My God. I knew this would happen. You’ve come,
she told the reporter, according to historical documentation of the encounter. Her husband, Russell, learned of her gruesome history for the first time through the reporter’s visit, though he chose to stay with her. When the story was published, shocked neighbors struggled to reconcile the friendly woman next door with a concentration camp criminal. Defiant about the scrutiny, Ryan remarked to the press, I was punished enough. I was in prison three years. Three years, can you imagine? And now they want something again from me?
Extradition, Courtroom Testimony, and Lifetime Imprisonment
Legal proceedings to remove her from the United States took years. The government stripped her of her citizenship in 1971 after proving she lied on her application regarding her Austrian conviction. During her 1972 deportation trial, harrowing testimonies laid bare her wartime actions. Mary Finkelstein, a 51-year-old survivor who spent seven weeks at Majdanek, testified that she saw another inmate clobbered like the seals are clobbered in North America
by Ryan. Finkelstein also recounted an instance where Ryan noticed a prisoner slouching, struck her with a stick, and shouted, Du schwein, du fluchte, Jude, stehgerade.
(You pig, you damn Jew, stand up straight
).
Ryan was complicit in the murders of more than 1,000 people. In 1973, she became the first United States citizen to be extradited for war crimes, sent back to West Germany to face trial for her actions at Majdanek. A court sentenced her to life in prison in 1981, and she died in 1999 at the age of 79.
Translating History to the Screen at the Toronto Film Festival
Director Ben Shirinian brought this dark history to the screen with the film “The Housewife,” which had its world premiere this week at the Toronto International Film Festival. The drama stars Naomi Watts as Ryan and Tye Sheridan as reporter Joseph Lelyveld, alongside Luke Evans as Russell Ryan. Film critics noted that the screenplay alters historical pacing and facts slightly to build suspense, structuring the narrative so that the reporter initially pursues the husband, suspecting him of being the Nazi.
While the film’s suspenseful framing aims to keep viewers guessing, reviewers observed that Naomi Watts’ intense performance makes the villain’s identity obvious early on. Despite creative liberties in the screenplay, the cinematic adaptation highlights a chilling historical reality: evil does not always look or sound like evil, and war criminals can hide in plain sight as ordinary neighbors.
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