Add The New York Post on Google She was the perfect American neighbor — sweet, hardworking and the ideal homemaker. Everybody liked her.
The new movie “The Housewife,” which had its world premiere this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, tells the strange story of Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, a notoriously cruel Nazi death camp guard who hid out undetected for years in New York, before finally being caught.
Director Ben Shirinian’s film, starring a Stepford-style Naomi Watts as Ryan, is just OK. The drama is often overplayed. Watts, with a store-bought sauerkraut accent, has been stuck in schmactor mode lately. And the screenplay fidgets with the facts of the real story in order to force a plot twist that doesn’t quite land.
But the history of this major event is fascinating — and frightening.
When New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld, operating on a tip from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, arrived at Ryan’s Maspeth, Queens, door in 1964, the war criminal among us said, “My God. I knew this would happen. You’ve come.”
The vicious woman hailed from Vienna, Austria, where she worked as a servant and eventually in a brewery. She later moved to Berlin in the 1930s and embraced rising Naziism.
Enthusiastic and needing money, Ryan applied for a job at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in Germany in 1939 and then was transferred to Majdanek in Poland in 1942.
She rose the ranks to assistant warden, and earned a bone-chilling nickname: “the stomping mare,” because she’d kill women with her steel-spiked boots. Hot-tempered Ryan would also whip prisoners to death and drag children by the hair. Grotesquely, she was awarded the War Merit Cross for her brutality.
After the war, a court in Austria, lacking evidence for her many murders, convicted Ryan of crimes against human dignity for non-fatal abuse and sentenced her to just three years in prison. She was released after four months for time served.
She then resumed a perfectly normal life. And while working at a hotel in 1957, she met Russell Ryan, an American Air Force mechanic. They married in Canada in 1958, and in 1959 finally moved to Queens, where she was accepted and popular. In 1963, Hermine — a former Nazi prison guard — received her American citizenship.
When Lelyveld went to the Ryans’ home for his story, he discovered that Russell knew nothing about his wife’s gruesome role in the Holocaust. He stayed with her anyway.
After the story ran, shocked neighbors couldn’t believe what they were reading. Who would think the nice lady next door used to work at a concentration camp?
“I was punished enough. I was in prison three years. Three years, can you imagine? And now they want something again from me?,” she said to the reporter.
“This is the end of everything for me.”
“The Housewife” misleadingly speeds up what happened next. If you assumed a known Nazi would be swiftly kicked out of the country, you’d be wrong. An investigation began, but she wasn’t stripped of her citizenship until 1971, when the government determined she’d lied on her application about her Austrian conviction.
During her deportation trial in 1972, there were many harrowing testimonies. A 51-year-old woman named Mary Finkelstein, who spent seven weeks at Majdanek, said that she’d seen another inmate “clobbered like the seals are clobbered in North America” by Hermine.
Finkelstein also said once when Hermine noticed a prisoner slouching, she “clobbered her” with a stick and shouted, “Du schwein, du fluchte, Jude, stehgerade.” (“You pig, you damn Jew, stand up straight”).
Hermine, who was complicit in the murders of more than 1,000 people, was finally deported to West Germany in 1973 where she was tried for her deadly acts at Majdanek — the first US citizen to be extradited for war crimes.
She was sentenced to life in prison in 1981 and died in 1999 at age 79.
What Shirinian’s decent film does to lead us off the scent and build suspense is make Hermine the main character and have Lelyveld (played by Tye Sheridan) first pursue Russell (Luke Evans). The reporter believes the husband is the Nazi — not the wife.
That’s not a bad idea, but Watts’ performance is so grand that even a viewer with no knowledge of Ryan will catch on pretty fast that she’s the bad guy.
The obviousness of her guilt waters down the movie’s most powerful point: Evil doesn’t always look or sound like evil.
