Inside of the concentration camp systems established by the SS during World War 2, there were a
number of despicable women who took part in horrific war crimes. They were known for their
sadistic approach to looking after the prisoners, and many were murderers. Women such as Irma
Grese were in their 20s when they administered execution, death and suffering on a huge scale
and they became notorious for their activities and actions. Many of these young women including
Elisabeth Volkenrath trained under more senior women, and one woman who helped to school
many women in brutality was Maria Mandl. She was accused of being involved in the deaths
of over half a million prisoners during her time at Auschwitz where she was the top ranking
female guard. But what were her crimes, and what happened when she faced justice inside
an execution chamber in Krakow in January 1948. Join us today as we look at the execution
of Maria Mandl, remember to support our channel; please make sure to subscribe.
Maria Mandl would become one of the most evil female guards of the whole concentration camp
system. She was born on the 10th January 1912 in Munzkirchen in Upper Austria which at the
time was part of Austria-Hungary. Her father was a well known shoemaker in the area. She
attended elementary school and then worked as an employee of a private company, and it’s
assumed that she had a normal upbringing. But no-one would anticipate the monster that
she became. In her younger years she did visit Switzerland and stayed abroad there for a
while, but then from 1937 she was employed by the Austrian Post. However things were
about to change heavily in Austria. Hitler had his eyes on the nation, and he wanted
to unite Germany and Austria and absorb the country into his third reich. It was believed
that the unification would form a greater Germany, and through a rigged ballot Hitler
would take Austria. However following this, Maria moved to Munich, and then on the 15th
October 1938, a year before the Second World War broke out, she joined the staff of a concentration
camp. It’s not known what motivated her to become a member of staff at Licthenburg
concentration camp, which is considered the first all female camp, but it’s believed
that it was politics and Hitler’s nazi party that had appealed to her. She worked at Lichtenburg
as an Aufseherin, or a female guard and she worked with 50 other SS women but it was clear
that she stood out along with the other women.
Lichtenburg was then closed, as a new purpose all female camp was created at Ravensbruck
and the female staff were then moved to Ravensbruck near to Berlin. Mandl whilst there quickly
rose throughout the ranks, and she continued to impress senior nazis and because of this
she became an SS oberaufseherin. She had previously joined the Nazis, and in April 1942 she was
in charge of other female guards. Maria Mandl was now on a daily basis overseeing roll call,
and also dishing out the punishment on prisoners, and in front of others she handed out beatings
and floggings. This was done to ensure that women stayed in line and in check. Over the
years, thousands of women were sent to Ravensbruck, and also many guards went there to train under
Maria Mandl. She would offer classes in which many women attended, and younger women such
as Irma Grese would learn under Maria Mandl and she would teach them how to create reigns
of terror and treat the inmates terribly. But then in October 1942, Maria Mandl was
transferred across to Auschwitz, and specifically Auschwitz II Birkenau, the main extermination
element of the largest concentration camp. She took Johanna Langefeld’s job, and served
as the SS Lagerfuhrerin of the women’s camp, and she was working directly under the Commandant
of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss. She was in control of all female prisoners, and she was overseeing
female guards and was the most senior woman at Auschwitz.
The women’s camp there was incredibly brutal, and Mandl was overseeing this. Rudolf Hoss
the commandant said of the women that worked there that, ‘It was easy to predict that
these beasts would mistreat the women over whom they exercised power, spiritual suffering
was completely alien to them.’ Mandl was in charge of the whole women’s camp, and
the conditions were terrible there. Dead bodies lay all over the site, and one woman wrote
of the women’s camp, ‘There was one latrine for thirty to thirty-two thousand women and
we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get
in to this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentry,
we could barely wait until our turn came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never
came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell that
surrounded us like a cloud. The latrine consisted of a deep ditch with planks thrown across
it at certain intervals. We squatted on those planks like birds perched on a telegraph wire,
so close together that we could not help soiling one another.’
Mandl developed a reputation for cruelty during her time at Auschwitz, and her control over
the women prisoners and guards was complete. Many men were even scared of her, and the
only person she answered to was Rudolf Hoss himself. She was in charge of signing the
inmates lists for prisoners who went to their deaths inside of the gas chambers. Victims
would arrive en mass on trains from all over Europe, and they were then offloaded from
the carriages and they then were selected to be admitted into the concentration camp,
and if not they went to their deaths in the gas chambers. Mandl was known for patrolling
the yards selecting those who went to their deaths. She took part in these selections
for two years and signed inmate lists to deport those to their deaths, and was known for driving
prisoners to the gas chambers with much brutality. It is believed that half a million women and
children were sent to their deaths and signed off on by Maria Mandl inside the gas chambers
at Auschwitz I and II. One prisoner told of Maria Mandl’s actions, and she said, ‘In
August 1943 I was deported together with my family (27 people, including nine children
aged from one month to eleven years) from the ghetto in Środula near Sosnowiec to
Auschwitz, in a transport numbering some 5,000 people. At the ramp in Birknau, the transport
was awaited by the defendant Mandl accompanied by SS woman Margot Dreschel, 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.”
Maria also administered torture and executions inside Auschwitz to terrorise the women. One
example of this was the execution of Mala Zimetbaum and her boyfriend who were condemned
for escaping the camp. It was said that whilst on the gallows, Mala refused to go to her
death, and she then lashed out at the SS guards, but then Maria Mandl ordered Mala, a young
woman to be sent to the crematoria and be burned alive. This actually happened, showing
how brutal she could really be. She also it was said ‘preferred to beat people herself
rather than have someone else do it,’ and for her violence she became known as the beast.
She went out of her way to find reasons to administer beatings.; For example if one woman
had one lock of hair that was curled and against the regulations, Maria would kick her to the
ground and beat her in the head. She then would shave them and paraded them around Auschwitz
with a sign around their neck saying, ‘I broke the rules and curled my hair.’ She
would also pick prisoners to work for her, and they were then murdered when she got bored
of them. One incident involved her selecting a child and she dressed this kid up in fine
clothing, and paraded it around Auschwitz. The child accompanied Maria throughout her
daily activities, and even held her hand, but she then threw the kid into the gas chambers
when she got bored.
Of some of the activities she got involved in, 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.’ If Mandl
did not like the look of someone, they were then never heard from again. She promoted
Irma Grese who she took a liking to to become the head of the Hungarian women’s camp,
and she saw her as her protege.
But one of the strangest things Maria Mandl did at Auschwitz was to organise a band that
would play. This was known as the Women’s orchestra of Auschwitz, and they played during
roll calls, executions and selections. It was described as, ‘The women who came back
from work exhausted had to march in time to the music. Music was ordered for all occasions,
for the addresses of the Camp Commanders, for the transports and whenever anybody was
hanged.’ Even Josef Mengele the Angel of Death was said to have bene move to tears
by the Orchestra’s music. But the beast continued to send thousands to their deaths,
and she was awarded the War Merit Cross 2nd class for her work at Auschwitz. But then
in November 1944, she was assigned to go and worked at the Muhldorf sub camp of Dachau,
and she was replaced by Elisabeth Volkenrath who became the head of the women’s camp
of Auschwitz. But then as the Second World War turned against the German army, like many
SS guards, Maria Mandl fled and tried to escape the clutches of allied captivity. She made
her way from Mulhdorf to the mountains of Southern Bavarian close to where she was born
in Munzkirchen, however it wasn’t long before she was arrested by the American Army. She
tried to appeal to her father to help hide her, but he refused to do this and she then
approached her sister for help but on the 10th August 1945 she was arrested. She was
heavily interrogated about her activities in Auschwitz and the other camps she worked
at, and it was found that she was rather intelligent, and she also was dedicated to her deadly work.
But she was then imprisoned inside a cell at the former Dachau camp alongside other
female guards such as Elizabeth Ruppert. The women would discuss their work during their
imprisonment, but the Americans then received a request from Poland to transfer Maria Mandl
to Polish custody. They wanted to try her for her crimes of Auschwitz in Poland, where
she committed most of her crimes. She was tried in the Auschwitz trial that began on
the 24th November 1947 in Krakow along with 39 other workers at the camp. It was said
of the defendants, ‘Torturing of prisoners [of Auschwitz] already tormented to the extreme
[by extrajudicial means], is the evidence of inhuman savagery perpetrated by those defendants
who as a result of the trial were sentenced to death. The listed violent crimes committed
by named defendants, who all took smaller or larger part in the mass murder of prisoners,
also reveal that the accused were involved in the acts of killing for pleasure, and not
pursuant to orders of their superiors. If it were not for their expressed desire to
kill, they would have otherwise displayed elements of sympathy for the victims, or at
least show indifference to their plight, but not torture them to death.’
For her crimes, Maria Mandl was sentenced to death and she was to be executed on the
24th January 1948 inside of Montelupich Prison in Krakow. She was held for a brief time inside
of the prison, and it was claimed that Maria Mandl in her final days did ask for forgiveness.
On the day of her execution, she was taken from her cell to the execution chamber inside
of the prison. At 7:09am the executions would begin inside the chamber, and Maria as she
was a woman was allowed to be executed first. She was taken into the chamber with four other
men who were condemned in the Auschwitz trials, and she was then placed on a simple step.
There was no gallows with trapdoors, but instead just meat hooks placed in the ceiling, and
these had nooses attached to them. Maria whilst on the step had the noose tied and secured
around her neck, and then quickly the step was removed and kicked out and she slowly
strangled to death. It was said that it took 15 minutes for all of the first group to be
executed and certified dead, and Maria was the first one who was left hanging.
Maria Mandl was a woman who it’s believed was personally responsible for the deaths
of 500,000 prisoners of Auschwitz. Her behaviour and actions inside of Auschwitz were horrifying
and were some of the most notorious of the concentration camps. She was a brutal guard
who would stop at nothing to make sure she inflicted misery, death and suffering on a
daily basis. She certainly deserved the nickname the beast, and for this at the age of 36 accused
of being complicit in the deaths of over 500,000 prisoners she was executed in an execution
chamber in Poland.
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