Hermine Braunsteiner, Austrian SS officer and Majdanek concentration camp guard (died 1999)

Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan was an Austrian SS Helferin and female camp guard at Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camps. She was the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States to face trial in West Germany. Braunsteiner was known to prisoners of Majdanek concentration camp as the "Stomping Mare" and was said to have beaten prisoners to death, thrown children by their hair onto trucks that took them to be murdered in gas chambers, hanged young prisoners and stomped an old prisoner to death with her jackboots.

The Schutzstaffel was a major paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II.

Majdanek was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had three gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, placing it among the largest of Nazi concentration camps. Although initially intended for forced labor rather than extermination, it was used to murder people an estimated 78,000 people during Operation Reinhard, the German plan to murder all Polish Jews within their own occupied homeland. In operation from 1 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, it was captured nearly intact. The rapid advance of the Soviet Red Army during Operation Bagration prevented the SS from destroying most of its infrastructure, and Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes failed to remove the most incriminating evidence of war crimes.

July 16 is the 197th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 168 days remain until the end of the year.