But it owes its existence to the day in 1964 when Simon Wiesenthal pointed an accusing finger at Mrs Russell Ryan, wife of a Queens construction worker. Nine years later, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan became the first war criminal ever to be deported from the US into custody of a country where she had committed some of her crimes. ‘I fought for nine years to extradite her to Germany,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘It was worth it just for her case alone, but it opened the door to dozens of other deportations from the US since then.’ Wiesenthal’s foot in the US’s revolving door took its first step in April 1964, when a woman recognized him in a Tel Aviv café and told him: ‘I was at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. There was a guard there named Hermine Braunsteiner who used a vicious dog and a whip weighted with lead on women prisoners. She enjoyed flogging us, she enjoyed it when we screamed and even more when we fainted. She was a complete sadist. When mothers with children were brought to the camp, she’d tear the children away.
