The 30th of January 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party,
is appointed chancellor of Germany and aims to lead the German “master
race” to victory in the "racial struggle" against those deemed as “inferior” peoples,
especially the Jews. The Nazi regime quickly begins to restrict the civil and human rights
of the Jewish people and gradually excludes them from professions, businesses, and public spaces.
The first concentration camp – Dachau – is established less than 2 months after Hitler
became the chancellor. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its European allies would establish
more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites, including ghettos. The perpetrators
would use these locations for forced labor, detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the
state," and the mass murder of millions. One such perpetrator is a German Nazi guard Therese Brandl.
Therese Brandl was born on the 1st of February, 1909,
in Bavarian Staudach-Egerndach, then part of the German Empire and was a waitress by profession.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933 and one year later
Brandl became a member of The German Labour Front or the DAF which was the national labour
organisation of the Nazi Party, which replaced the various independent trade unions in Germany.
The DAF served as the single, government-controlled trade union
for German workers, replacing all independent labor unions that existed prior to the Nazis'
rise to power. While the German Labour Front presented itself as an advocate for workers'
rights, its main purpose was to consolidate and centralize power in the hands of the Nazi state.
It sought to suppress dissent and maintain control over the German workforce, ensuring
their loyalty to the Nazi regime. The Second World War began on the
1st of September, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. Therese Brandl’s criminal career in
concentration camps began the following year when she arrived in Ravensbrück
Concentration Camp to be trained as a guard. Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only
major women's camp established by the Nazis. Ravensbrück camp was staffed both by SS men,
who served as guards and administrators, and by 150 women, who served as supervisors. These
female supervisors were either SS volunteers or women who had taken the job for the good
pay and working conditions. Ravensbrück also housed a training camp for female SS guards who
were taught by Maria Mandl - the sadistically cruel German Nazi officer and supervisor - who
instructed trainees on how to handle the prisoners that they were going to supervise.
These prisoners would have to work until they died and the task of their supervisors, such as
Therese Brandl, was to get a maximum amount of work out of them whilst they were still alive.
Ravensbrück thus also became a training center or “a school of violence “ for
about 3,500 female guards who went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps.
In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles,
Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished.
In March 1942 Brandl was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp located in German occupied
Poland where at first, she worked in the laundry. The Germans established Auschwitz in May 1940. The
direct reason for the establishment of the camp, which was located around 60 km west of Krakow,
was the fact that mass arrests of Poles were increasing beyond the capacity of
existing "local" prisons. The first 30 prisoners,
the German criminals with green badges, arrived in Auschwitz on the 20th of May 1940 from
the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In the beginning, as with most German
concentration camps, Auschwitz I served three purposes: to incarcerate real and perceived
enemies of the Nazi regime; to provide a supply of forced laborers for deployment
in SS-owned construction-related enterprises and to kill small, targeted groups of the
population. It was only in 1942 when Auschwitz also became the largest of the extermination
centers where the final solution to the Jewish question – which referred to the Nazi plan to
murder European Jews - was carried out. During the Holocaust, Auschwitz was the
only location where concentration camp prisoners received tattoos.
Incoming prisoners were assigned a camp serial number which was sewn into their uniforms.
However, only those prisoners selected for work were issued with serial numbers. Those prisoners
who were sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered and received no tattoos.
Numerous testimonies from survivors and witnesses attest to Brandl's cruelty and sadistic behavior.
She took pleasure in physically abusing prisoners and was known for her particularly harsh treatment
of women and children. She would harass the prisoners in such a way that in the summer
she would give out warm winter underwear and shoes, while in the winter she would issue
summer underwear and clogs, besides which she would beat the prisoners personally.
In her capacity, she harassed female prisoners, refusing to issue them with clothing or underwear
from the inventory, and when she did issue these items, they were riddled with lice.
According to Antonina Piątkowska, a prisoner who served at the Auschwitz from the 27th of
April 1942 until the liquidation of the camp on the 18th of January 1945, Brandl displayed a
particularly hostile attitude toward Polish female prisoners. She carried out block inspections,
alone or with other SS women, in the course of which she beat and insulted the prisoners,
calling them “Polish pigs”. Piatkowska remembered how Brandl had beaten and kicked one prisoner
after she had caught her eating a raw potato. On one occasion, during an inspection of the block,
she also beat Piatkowska, calling here a ‘polish pig’ and added that they’d lived too long anyway.
Brandl was physically abusing not only to women but also children. Andreas Larinciakos, a
nine-year-old boy from Cles, Italy, recalled one occasion when all children were transferred from
one camp to another and during the count one child was missing. As a punishment, Theresa
Brandl would make all children wake up at 1 AM in the morning, drive them outside and make them
stand in the frost until noon the following day. Brandl also took part in selections of the female
prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers. These selections occurred every week during general
assemblies, when the female inmates had to strip naked, regardless of whether. Therese
Brandl personally chose who was to stay and who was to be exterminated and thus became the master
of life and death of the Auschwitz prisoners. The prisoners had to stand to attention and if
they moved or did not stand straight in line, Brandl would kick and beat them so hard that
such prisoners would frequently die. As one Holocaust survivor testified, almost every
roll call of this sort ended with several deaths. There Brandl was so efficient at her job that in
the summer of 1943, she received a medal from the Reich for her “good conduct” in the camps.
On January 27, 1945, the Soviet 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front led by Marshal Ivan Konev,
reached the Auschwitz complex. As they advanced, they encountered the horrifying reality of the
camp and its atrocities. The Red Army soldiers discovered the evidence of mass murder,
gas chambers, crematoria, and the emaciated and traumatized survivors. It is estimated that a
minimum 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 and
of these, at least 1.1 million were murdered By the time of the Auschwitz liberation Therese
Brandl was already serving at the Mühldorf, which was a subcamp complex of the Dachau concentration
camp, where she had arrived in November 1944. The Mühldorf camps were established to provide
labor for underground installations in order to produce the Messerschmitt 262 – a German fighter
aircraft and fighter-bomber that was the world's first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft.
Conditions at the Mühldorf complex were dismal. The SS guards carried out “selections” at the
Mühldorf complex in the fall of 1944, deporting hundreds of sick and disabled inmates to the gas
chambers at Auschwitz. It is estimated that more than half of the prisoners held there
perished following their deportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center or died on
site from overwork, abuse, shootings, and disease. Prisoners in the Mühldorf “forest camps V and VI”
were housed in earthen huts, barracks partially submerged in the ground with soil-covered roofs
designed to camouflage the structures from Allied aerial reconnaissance. Prisoners frequently worked
10 to 12 hour days hauling heavy bags of cement and carrying out other arduous construction tasks.
In late April, as the US Army approached the camps, the SS forcibly evacuated
some 3,600 prisoners from the camp on death marches.
On 27 April 1945, Brandl fled Mühldorf and went into the hiding to the in the Bavarian mountains
of Germany as she knew she would have to pay for the crimes she had committed during the war.
4 months later, on August 29,1945, she was arrested by the US Army and sent to a holding
camp to await questioning. Eventually she was handed over to the polish authorities
and together with 40 other Auschwitz staff members she would spend weeks at the Montelupich prison in
Krakow awaiting the verdict of the Poland's Supreme National Tribunal. While in prison,
Therese Brandl shared a cell with Maria Mandl, the infamous Beast of Auschwitz.
In the cell next to Therese Brandl and Maria Mandl was imprisoned Stanisława Rachwałowa, a Polish
survivor of Auschwitz who was an inmate under Mandl's administration. Rachwałowa was arrested
by Poland's post-war communist authorities as an "anti-communist activist" and sentenced to death.
Rachwalowa recalled one occasion, when several days before the Supreme National Tribunal’s
verdict, she was ordered to take a bath together with Therese Brandl and Maria Mandl: “in the
afternoon we were summoned to take a bath. Through the pouring water and clouds of steam I kept my
eyes on the German women. Suddenly, I noticed that the two of them were slowly approaching me.
Mandel led the way, with Brandl following closely behind. Fear from the past seized me, leaving me
terrified and defenseless. And there stood the former beast of Auschwitz, Maria Mandel, just
two steps away from me—wet, small, and humble, tears streaming down her face. She spoke slowly,
struggling with her words, catching her breath, yet it was clear: ‘’Ich bitte um Verzeihung" (I am
asking for forgiveness). Brandl, standing behind her, was crying uncontrollably. I cried with them.
I took their outstretched, pleading hands and said: I forgive you on behalf of the prisoners.
At that moment, they both threw themselves on their knees and began to kiss my hands’.
In the face of death Therese Brandl was forgiven by a former inmate for her unspeakable crimes but
that did not help her escape justice. On the 22nd of December 1947,
the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced Therese Brandl to death by hanging.
Brandl was hanged on 24 January 1948, just a few days before her 46th birthday.
There were no tears shed for Therese Brandl.
thanks for watching the World History Channel be sure to like And subscribe
and take the Bell notification icon so you don't miss our next
episodes we thank you and we'll see you next time on the channel
foreign