The 6th of June 1944. Allied infantry and armored divisions begin landing on the Normandy coast in
France. This largest seaborne invasion in history marks a turning point in World War
2 and becomes the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. On the following month in July 1944,
the Soviet forces liberate Majdanek - the first major Nazi camp located in German-occupied Poland.
Only after the liberation of the concentration camps, the full extent of Nazi horrors is
finally exposed to the world. Because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food,
only a small percentage of concentration camp inmates survive. Compounded by months
and years of mistreatment and torture, they resemble skeletons and many of them are so weak
that they can hardly move at all. One of the most infamous perpetrators
of this criminal Nazi regime responsible for these atrocities is Maria Mandl.
Maria Mandl was born on the 10th of January 1912 in Austrian Münzkirchen, then part of
Austria-Hungary. Her father was a shoemaker and Maria, after attending elementary school,
became a clerk by profession working for the Austrian Post.
Mandl was 26 years old when Adolf Hitler annexed the Federal State of Austria into the German
Reich. The Anschluss, as it became known, took place over three days between the 11th and 13th
of March 1938. The Anschluss was supported by many Austrians, among them Austrian Nazis,
who saw it as a political, social, and cultural reunification with their brother country,
Germany. Thousands, including Maria Mandl, turned out to greet Adolf Hitler, the native son who was
returning to his homeland. Even though the leaders of the West saw the Anschluss as an invasion,
not one government made a move to stop Hitler who, without interference,
felt free to embark upon the next step in his scheme to conquer all of Europe.
In September 1938 Mandl moved to Munich in Germany and one month later she was deployed
as a guard in Lichtenburg concentration camp. Housed in a Renaissance castle,
Lichtenburg was among the first concentration camps to be built
by the Nazis and was operated by the SS from 1933 to 1939. From 1937 to 1939,
it held only female prisoners. Mandl’s specialty at Lichtenburg was to strip the prisoners naked,
tie them to wooden posts and beat them mercilessly until she could no longer lift her arm.
On the 15th of May 1939, Mandl was sent with the
other guards to the newly opened Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women's camp established by the
Nazis. 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.
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 trained here 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 Maria Mandl,
was to get a maximum amount of work out of them whilst they were still alive. About 3,500 women
were trained at Ravensbrück and went on to serve either there or at other concentration camps.
Initially, Mandl worked at Ravensbrück as a detail leader but thanks to heavy hands and quick temper,
she soon impressed her superiors and at the beginning of 1940 she became a prison warden
in the cell block. In April 1941, Mandl joined the Nazi party and one year later in April 1942 she
was promoted to the rank of senior supervisor. Her duties included overseeing the work assignments of
the guards that she supervised, daily roll calls and punishments such as beatings and flogging.
In addition, she also selected women for human experiments.
From Ravensbrück Maria Mandl was sent to Auschwitz in German occupied Poland
where she arrived on the 7th of October 1942.
She was in control of all the female Auschwitz camps and female subcamps and reported directly
to Rudolf Höss – the camp’s commandant. Her control over both her female subordinates
and female prisoners, who used to call her “ the Beast”, was absolute.
Because she was exceptionally cruel, she also became one of the most hated guards in the camp.
Maria Mandl got along well with Irma Grese, another sadistic Nazi guard,
whom she promoted to the head of one of the Hungarian women’s camp at Auschwitz -Birkenau.
During Mand’s reign of terror, newborns and several-month-old babies
were frequently drowned or burned alive in furnaces. There was a known case in the
camp when Mandl ordered a newborn baby to be thrown outside, where rats then ate the child.
In addition, she cruelly persecuted pregnant women, whom Josef Klehr,
a self-proclaimed doctor and the head of the SS disinfection commando at Auschwitz,
killed with phenol injections directly into the heart.
She also assigned women and children to pseudo-medical experiments
conducted by SS doctors such as Josef Mengele.
Mandl would beat the female prisoners for the smallest violations of the rules
such as curling their hair which was against the camp’s regulations. If she found even a
single curly lock on a prisoner, she would kick her to the ground and beat her around the head.
And if she was in a particularly evil mood, she would shave their heads and parade them around
the camp with a sign around their neck that read: “I broke the rules and curled my hair.”
On one occasion when Mandl saw a female prisoner with naturally wavy hair, she marched her to a
bathroom, ordered her to lean over the bath and kept pouring alternately hot and cold water over
her head. When the inmate said something back to her, Mandl beat her with her rubber whip so hard
that the woman’s whole face was left in cuts and she had to go to the hospital.
Mandl often stood at the gate into Birkenau waiting for an inmate to turn and look at her.
Those who did, were taken out of the lines and never heard from again.
One evening in the summer of 1943, when a commando numbering some 500 women was coming back from work
in “Canada” warehouses, Mandl ordered that every tenth woman be flogged. Every tenth woman from
among the prisoners who stood in fives was chosen and several dozen prisoners were then flogged.
On another occasion when one prisoner gave the other inmate an extra portion of soup,
Maria Mandl poured it over the prisoner’s head and beat her with a whip.
Mandl then sent the prisoner to the infamous penal company,
situated in notorious Block 11, where the inmate remained for 4 months and was continually beaten
by the SS men and prisoner functionaries while having to perform the hardest labor.
In December 1944, when one female inmate was walking through the camp street,
she accidently bumped into Maria Mandl. Even though she immediately apologized,
Mandl severely punished her with seven nights in a standing cell, in which one could not lie down,
only stand. During the day the exhausted prisoner had to work in the kitchen.
One very frosty Sunday in the winter of 1942 or 1943, Mandl organized a general roll call.
During roll calls the prisoners were lined up in rows of ten and then counted, which
sometimes took hours which could be especially tormenting for the prisoners, particularly in the
bad weather. However this roll call lasted from 5.00 a.m. to the late in the evening hours. Due
to freezing weather and exhaustion, many prisoners collapsed and were then taken to the gas chambers.
Mandl also took part in selections on the rail ramp when the SS doctors made most of
the decisions about who was qualified for labor, and who was killed immediately. The
men and older boys were in one column, and the women and children of both sexes in the other.
During these selections, Mandl tortured the prisoners in a cruel way, beating the women,
the men and the children with a whip and kicking them blindly.
She would tear the children from the arms of their mothers, and when the mothers tried to come
near the children and defend them, Mandl would beat the mothers horribly and also kick them.
On one occasion when a young mother tried to go near her two-year-old child
thrown onto the car, Mandl kicked and beat her so cruelly that she could not get up anymore.
After the war one defendant testified how she had held her four-year-old child by the hand.
Then Mandl approached her, tore the child away and threw the child onto a still empty car so
that the child got wounded in the face and began to cry and call the mother who had been put aside
to the group that was not loaded onto the cars. When the mother tried to reach the crying child,
Mandl began to beat her so cruelly that the woman fell. Mandl continued to kick the mother although
she was lying on the ground, and using her shoes she knocked out almost all the woman’s teeth.
Mandl also took part in selections of the veteran prisoners to the crematorium.
These selections occurred every week during general assemblies, when the female inmates
had to strip naked, regardless of whether. Maria Mandl personally chose who was to stay and who was
to be exterminated. The prisoners had to stand to attention. If they moved or did not stand straight
in line, Mandl would beat them with a whip so hard that such prisoners would frequently die.
As one Holocaust survivor testified, almost every roll call of this sort ended with several deaths.
Another prisoner testified that on one occasion Mandl had selected thousands of women for gas
chambers but before they were executed, she had crammed 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.
And almost all the corpses had bitten fingers and breasts and plucked out eyes.
If any prisoner wanted to carry water or some food to that block during these seven days,
she was arrested and perished along with the rest. Mandl is believed to have been directly complicit
in the deaths of over 500,000 prisoners. After the war, one prisoner testified
that Maria Mandl had said that a prisoner should stay alive six weeks at the most.
In addition to mistreating the prisoners,
one of Mandl’s responsibilities was appointing the female prisoners to the camp brothel.
In April 1943, Mandl, famously known for her taste in music, created Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz
which consisted mostly of young female Jewish and Slavic prisoners, of varying nationalities.
The members of the orchestra were treated relatively better than the other female prisoners.
Members of the orchestra had clean, ironed striped uniforms, nice caps, elegantly broadened trousers
and what was most important - better food. This orchestra not only entertained the
concentration camp’ SS personnel and visitors, but also accompanied roll calls, executions,
selections and transports. The orchestra would perform
for hours no matter what weather conditions. Heinrich Himmler was said to be a great admirer of
Mandl’s orchestra and Dr. Mengele was reportedly brought to tears by some of their music.
Mandl was especially fond of Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly which one of the prisoners,
Fania Fénelon, sometimes had to sing and play to her in the middle of the night.
For her services, Maria Mandl received the War Merit Cross, 2nd class. When in November
1944 she was sent to the Mühldorf, which was a subcamp complex of the Dachau concentration camp,
Elisabeth Volkenrath succeeded her as head of female camps at Auschwitz,
which was liberated by the Soviets 2 months later on the 27th of January 1945.
The Mühldorf camps were established to provide labor for underground installations
in order to produce the Messerschmitt 262 – 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 guards forcibly evacuated some 3,600 prisoners from the camp on death marches.
In 1945, Mandl fled Mühldorf to the Alps as she knew she would have to pay for the
crimes she had committed during the war. When she turned up in her birthplace,
Münzkirchen, her father refused to allow her to live in her parents' house.
On the 10th of August 1945, she was arrested
and interrogated by the US soldiers. She was described as intelligent,
sophisticated and cruel at the same time. In 1946 she was extradited to Poland where
she was tried at the Auschwitz Trial which began on the 24th of November 1947 and lasted one month.
On the 22nd of December 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow
sentenced Mandl to death by hanging. Her cruelty was once again emphasized in
the verdict which said that "The accused even mistreated the female prisoners
who had already been singled out by her on the selection path to death."
A few days before the execution, Mandl expressed remorse and asked her former
inmate, whom she had mistreated at Auschwitz, for forgiveness.
She was 36 years old when she was executed on the 24th of January
1948. Her last words were“ Long live Poland”. Her body was subsequently made available to
medical students at the University of Kraków as illustrative material.
There were no tears shed for Maria Mandl.
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