New movie depicts a vicious Nazi death camp guard, who lived for years in Queens undetected

She was the perfect American neighbor — sweet, hardworking and the ideal homemaker.Everybody liked her. She was also a Nazi.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....