December 22, 1947, Krakow, Poland. The former staff of Auschwitz - the
deadliest German Nazi concentration camp – hears their sentences read.
After a month of gruesome testimonies, 23 defendants out of the 41 are sentenced
to death by hanging. One of them is Maria Mandl, one of the most notorious Nazi guards.
Maria Mand, the daughter of shoemaker, was born on 10 January 1912 in Austria,
then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the Anschluss - annexation of Austria
into Nazi Germany on the 12 March 1938, she moved to Munich, Germany.
Mandl worked as a female guard in various concentration camps including Lichtenburg and
Ravensbrück. In April 1941, she joined the Nazi Party. She committed her worst crimes during her
stay at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland where she arrived in October 1942. Mandl became
head of the Auschwitz women's camps reporting directly to Rudolf Höss - camp’s commandant.
A fanatic Nazi, Maria Mandl was exceptionally cruel and became one of the most hated guards
in the camp. The prisoners used to call her “the Beast “ and she got along well with Irma Grese,
another bestial Nazi Guard, whom Mandl promoted to head of one of the women’s camps in Auschwitz.
Mandl was known to strip the women prisoners naked, tied them to a wooden pillar, and beat
them until she could no longer raise her hand. She loved music and at Auschwitz Mandl founded
a women’s orchestra which used to accompany roll calls, executions
as well as selections and transports. She used to participate in selections for gas chambers
and it is estimated that she sent more than 500,000 women and children to crematoriums.
During selections, Mandl enjoyed tearing children away from their mothers,
beating the prisoners with whip and kicking them to death.
After the war, one prisoner testified that on one occasion Mandl had selected thousands of
women for gas chambers but before they were executed, she had packed them naked into one
block for 7 days with no food or water. After one week of unimaginable suffering, when they were
finally released to find death in gas chambers, there were more corpses than surviving women.
In November 1944, she left Auschwitz for Mühldorf concentration camp.
As Soviet troops approached the camp, the SS organized death marches
meaning forced evacuation of the prisoners in late April 1945. Mandl fled in May 1945
as she knew she would have to pay for all the atrocities she had committed during the war.
Her escape did not help her. Maria Mandl was arrested by the US army on 10 August, 1945 and
in November 1946 she was extradited back to Poland where she finally faced justice for her crimes.
She was tried at the Auschwitz trial which began on November 24,
1947. The trial lasted one month and sentenced Maria Mandl to death by hanging.
Before the sentence was carried out, she expressed remorse and asked her former inmate
at Auschwitz for forgiveness. She was 36 years old when
she was hung on 24 January 1948, There were no tears shed for Maria Mandl.
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