Inside of the concentration camps during the Second World War and before, there were horrific
and savage guards who would instil such fear and terror to prisons. Many of the SS guards
who worked inside of camps such as Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz were responsible for the murders,
executions and exterminations of thousands of innocent people, and were the ones who
instilled Hitler and the Third Reich’s horrific policies on persecution and mass killing.
One of the most evil female guards who worked inside of Auschwitz was Maria Mandl, a woman
who was involved in the training of hundreds of other female guards. Inside her training
school at Ravensbruck, these women would be involved in learning how to strike fear into
the prisoners, and Mandl would teach the women how to do this.
But after the end of World War 2, Mandl was sentenced to death and was executed for war
crimes and crimes against humanity, but it was said that she was responsible and complicit
for the deaths of over 500,000 prisoners. Join us today as we look at, ‘The DISGUSTING
Crimes Of Maria Mandl - The Beast of Birkenau.’ Remember to support our channel, please make
sure to subscribe.
Following the Anschluss of Austria, Maria Mandl who lived within Austria moved to Munich,
and became involved first in concentration camps in October 1938. She joined the staff
at Lichtenburg and she must have been an ardent Nazi to make this shift rather quickly. Inside
of this early camp in Saxony, Mandl and other 50 women worked as staff, and she was an Aufseherin.
However as time went on, the Nazis expanded their prison systems and network of camps
and they opened an exclusive women’s camp named Ravensbruck. Inside here thousands of
women would be held as the Second World War waged on, but Ravensburck became a Nazi SS
guard training school. Inside of here, many women would be sent to the camp to learn how
to become guards and then they would go to other sites such as Bergen-Belsen.
But inside of Ravensbruck, Mandl impressed her superiors and she then became an SS Oberaufseherin
in April 1942. Whilst at Ravensbruck, she was in charge of the daily roll call, and
also would dish out much of the punishments such as floggings, beatings and would even
oversee executions. She was a very senior guard, but as the Final Solution ramped up
across Nazi occupied lands, Auschwitz became the largest killing site of the Holocaust.
Mandl was assigned to Auschwitz II Birkenau, which was the extermination centre at the
camp and Mandl became an SS Lagerfuhrerin, and was working under Rudolf Hoss.
She was the most senior female member of staff at Auschwitz, and was seen as a woman who
could inflict such brutality and fear into the prisoners. She had control and absolute
power over the women inside the camp, and she only reported to Commandant Rudolf Hoess.
She was in charge of all of the female sub camps at Auschwitz, and she promoted many
other horrific guards to oversee the reign of terror. She was known for standing at the
gates of Auschwitz Birkenau, and if anyone dared to even look at her standing there,
they would be seized and then killed being sent to the gas chambers or murdered on Mandl’s
orders. She became known at Auschwitz as the Beast, and for two years she was involved
in sending thousands of people especially women and children to their deaths in the
selections.
As women and children arrived at the camp, most were sent straight to the gas chambers
at selections and very few made their way into the camp, only those who were considered
useful enough to conduct work. She signed the inmate lists and the death lists, and
because of this, she oversaw the deaths of over half a million people inside of the gas
chambers at Auschwitz. There were many accounts of her horrific treatment at Auschwitz, that
came out at her trial and more stories of Mandl’s violent tendencies came out.
One Jewish prisoner at trial would state, ‘At the ramp in Birknau, the transport was
awaited by the defendant Mandl accompanied by SS woman Margot Drechsel, and as soon as
the transport had arrived, Mandl carried out a selection, sending approximately 90 percent
of the transport to the cars which transported these people to the nearby crematorium. During
these selections, defendant 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 kick them.
I saw – right next to me – a young, 20-year-old mother, who tried to go near her two-year-old
child thrown onto the car, and Mandl kicked and beat her so cruelly that she didn’t
get up any more. I held my four-year-old child by the hand. The defendant Mandl approached me,
tore my child away from me and threw the child onto a still empty car so that the child got
wounded in the face and began to cry and call me, but I was put aside to the group that
wasn’t loaded onto the cars. When I tried to reach the child, crying on the car, Mandl
began to beat me so cruelly that I fell. Mandl continued to kick me although I was lying
on the ground, and she knocked out almost all of my teeth with her shoe.
More stories of Mandl’s brutality emerged, for example Sala Feder’s account who told
of the torture instigated inside of Block 25 at Auschwitz. Mandl was the one responsible
for this. It was said, ‘In my block [Block 15], 700 women were chosen out of 1,000; in
the whole camp (that is, in lager A, where we stayed in the so-called quarantine), Mandl
selected several thousand women, and all of them – naked – were crammed into one block
no. 25, where they stayed for seven days and nights without food or water. On the night
of 27 September, they were transported to the crematorium.
For the period of these seven days, we heard horrible screams and groans issuing from that
block, and when the women were taken to the crematorium, the block elder, a Slovakian
woman named Cyla (who had already been tried in Czechoslovakia), told us that after those
seven days there were more corpses than living people in that block, and that almost all
of them had bitten fingers and breasts and plucked out eyes.
During these seven days, if any prisoner wanted to carry water or some food to that block,
she was arrested there and perished along with the rest. The above-described selection
was carried by the defendant Mandl in person, with the help from kapos: Stenia, Leo and
Maria, all of them cruel and used to torturing the prisoners in a horrible manner.
She had a need to inflict such violence and brutality onto prisoners, and also instil
the necessary mentality in her sub-ordinates that this was what was needed. She would beat
prisoners who were stripped naked and tied to wooden posts, and it was said along with
fellow guard Dorothea Binz, Mandl preferred to beat people with her bare hands rather
than to ask others to do it. It was said that she looked for women who had curled their
hair as this was against the camps rules, and if she found one curly lock of hair, she
would kick and beat women to the ground, kicking them in the head. She sometimes even shaved
the heads of these women and forced them to walk around Auschwitz with a sign around their
neck saying ‘I broke the rules and curled my hair.’ She was seen kicking inmates to
death, and one witness saw her kill a prisoner during roll call, whilst a piano was heard
playing from a barrack building.
Maria Mandl eventually was awarded the War Merit Cross 2nd class, and then was moved
to a sub camp of Dachau before the war came to an end. She fled and tried to escape into
the mountains of Southern Bavaria but was caught and captured. She was then handed over
to the Polish for her war crimes trial, and she was found to have been very intelligent
but incredibly devoted to her work inside of the camps. Following her trial, she was
sentenced to death and was accused of being involved in the deaths of 500,000 people for
her selections and the fact her signature was on the prisoner lists.
She was taken into a Krakow Prison that was notorious for it’s use as a Gestapo prison
during world war 2, and was held for a short time before she was hanged alongside many
other former members of staff at Auschwitz. But Maria Mandl’s brutality was not up for
question, there were so many witnesses of her evil and sadistic actions towards innocent
prisoners. She was a murderer, and a woman who actively participated and engineered the
genocide inside the concentration camps. She was a woman who trained an army of female
guards to also carry out work like she did, and to inflict a reign of terror onto the
people of Auschwitz. Today many of Maria Mandl’s crimes still remain untold.
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