Between 1939 and 1945, around 10% of concentration camp guards were women, yet these Aufseherinnen (overseers) as they were known, barely feature in Holocaust history or literature. On the few occasions they do appear, it is most commonly as a masculinised sadist when the reality was much more complex.
I first became interested in the Aufseherinnen after reading a New York Times article about Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, the first person to be extradited from America for Nazi war crimes, and decided to write a novel around her story. In the camps she earned the nickname “the Mare” – which would become the title of my novel – because she was known to kick prisoners to death. After the war, she fled to Vienna and faded into obscurity.
In 1957, American engineer Russell Ryan met Braunsteiner while holidaying in Austria. She did not tell him about her past. They fell in love, married and moved to New York, where they lived quiet lives until she was tracked down by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Russell could not believe she had been a Nazi concentration camp guard. His wife, he said, “would not hurt a fly”.
