Maria Mandl was born on January 10, 1912, in the Austrian town of Münzkirchen, then part of Austria-Hungary. Her father worked as a shoemaker, and after attending elementary school she became a clerk for the Austrian Post.
She was 26 years old when Adolf Hitler annexed Austria into the German Reich in the event known as the Anschluss, which took place over three days between March 11 and 13, 1938. The annexation was supported by many Austrians, including Austrian Nazis, who saw it as a reunification with Germany. Thousands of people, Maria Mandl among them, turned out to greet Hitler as he returned to his homeland.
Western leaders viewed the Anschluss as an invasion, but no government moved to stop Hitler. Without interference, he felt free to pursue the next step in his plan to conquer Europe.
In September 1938, Mandl moved to Munich, Germany. One month later she was deployed as a guard at Lichtenburg concentration camp.
Lichtenburg was housed in a Renaissance castle and was among the first concentration camps built by the Nazis, operated by the SS from 1933 to 1939. From 1937 to 1939 it held only female prisoners. Mandl's specialty there was to strip prisoners naked, tie them to wooden posts, and beat them mercilessly until she could no longer lift her arm.
On May 15, 1939, Mandl was sent with other guards to the newly opened Ravensbrück concentration camp. Opened in May 1939, Ravensbrück was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis. In total, some 132,000 women from across Europe passed through it, including Poles, Russians, Jews, and Roma. Of that number, more than 92,000 women perished.
Ravensbrück was staffed 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. The camp also housed a training facility for female SS guards, where roughly 3,500 women were trained before serving at Ravensbrück or other camps.
Initially, Mandl worked at Ravensbrück as a detail leader. Thanks to her 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 she 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 she supervised, daily roll calls, and punishments such as beatings and flogging. She also selected women for human experiments.
From Ravensbrück, Mandl was sent to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland, arriving on October 7, 1942. She controlled 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 the female prisoners, who called her "the Beast," was absolute. Because she was exceptionally cruel, she became one of the most hated guards in the camp.
Mandl got along well with Irma Grese, another sadistic Nazi guard, whom she promoted to head one of the Hungarian women's camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. During Mandl's reign of terror, newborns and several-month-old babies were frequently drowned or burned alive in furnaces.
In one known case, Mandl ordered a newborn baby to be thrown outside, where rats ate the child. She also cruelly persecuted pregnant women, whom Josef Klehr, a self-proclaimed doctor and head of the SS disinfection commando at Auschwitz, killed with phenol injections directly into the heart. She assigned women and children to pseudo-medical experiments conducted by SS doctors such as Josef Mengele.
Mandl beat female prisoners for the smallest violations of camp rules, such as curling their hair. If she found even a single curly lock on a prisoner, she would kick her to the ground and beat her around the head. If she was in a particularly evil mood, she would shave their heads and parade them around the camp with a sign reading, "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 poured alternately hot and cold water over her head. When the inmate talked back, Mandl beat her with a rubber whip so hard that the woman's 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 of some 500 women was returning from work in the "Canada" warehouses, Mandl ordered that every tenth woman be flogged. Every tenth woman among the prisoners standing in fives was chosen, and several dozen prisoners were flogged.
On another occasion, when one prisoner gave another inmate an extra portion of soup, Mandl poured it over the prisoner's head and beat her with a whip. Mandl then sent the prisoner to the infamous penal company in Block 11, where the inmate remained for four months, continually beaten by SS men and prisoner functionaries while performing the hardest labor.
In December 1944, when a female inmate accidentally bumped into Mandl while walking through the camp street, Mandl severely punished her despite an immediate apology. The prisoner was sentenced to seven nights in a standing cell, where 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, prisoners were lined up in rows of ten and counted, sometimes taking hours and proving especially tormenting in bad weather. This roll call lasted from 5:00 a.m. until late in the evening. Due to the 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, where SS doctors made most of the decisions about who was qualified for labor and who was killed immediately. Men and older boys were placed in one column, and women and children of both sexes in the other.
During these selections, Mandl tortured prisoners in a cruel way, beating women, men, and children with a whip and kicking them blindly. She tore children from the arms of their mothers, and when the mothers tried to come near and defend them, Mandl beat and kicked the mothers horribly.
On one occasion, when a young mother tried to go near her two-year-old child who had been thrown onto a 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 when Mandl approached, tore the child away, and threw the child onto a still empty car. The child was wounded in the face and began to cry and call for the mother, who had been put aside with the group not loaded onto the cars.
When the mother tried to reach the crying child, Mandl beat her so cruelly that she fell. Mandl continued to kick the mother as she lay on the ground, and using her shoes she knocked out almost all of the woman's teeth.
Mandl also took part in selections of veteran prisoners for the crematorium. These selections occurred every week during general assemblies, when female inmates had to strip naked. Mandl personally chose who was to stay and who was to be exterminated.
The prisoners had to stand at 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 selected thousands of women for the gas chambers but, before they were executed, crammed them naked into one block for seven days with no food or water. After a week of unimaginable suffering, when they were finally released to find death in the gas chambers, there were more corpses than surviving women. Almost all the corpses had bitten fingers and breasts and plucked-out eyes. If any prisoner tried to carry water or food to that block during those 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 Mandl had said a prisoner should stay alive six weeks at the most.
In addition to mistreating prisoners, one of Mandl's responsibilities was appointing female prisoners to the camp brothel. In April 1943, Mandl, known for her taste in music, created the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, consisting mostly of young female Jewish and Slavic prisoners of varying nationalities.
Members of the orchestra were treated relatively better than other female prisoners. They had clean, ironed striped uniforms, nice caps, elegantly broadened trousers, and, most importantly, better food. The orchestra entertained the camp's SS personnel and visitors and also accompanied roll calls, executions, selections, and transports. It performed for hours regardless of 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 prisoner, Fania Fénelon, sometimes had to sing and play for her in the middle of the night. For her services, Mandl received the War Merit Cross, 2nd class.
In November 1944, Mandl was sent to Mühldorf, a subcamp complex of the Dachau concentration camp. Elisabeth Volkenrath succeeded her as head of the female camps at Auschwitz, which was liberated by the Soviets two months later on January 27, 1945.
The Mühldorf camps were established to provide labor for underground installations producing the Messerschmitt 262, the world's first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft. Conditions there were dismal.
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 after 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, SS guards forcibly evacuated some 3,600 prisoners on death marches.
In 1945, Mandl fled Mühldorf to the Alps, knowing she would have to pay for the crimes she had committed during the war. When she turned up in her birthplace of Münzkirchen, her father refused to allow her to live in her parents' house.
On August 10, 1945, she was arrested and interrogated by US soldiers. She was described as intelligent and 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 November 24, 1947, and lasted one month. On December 22, 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced Mandl to death by hanging.
Her cruelty was once again emphasized in the verdict, which stated 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 a former inmate whom she had mistreated at Auschwitz for forgiveness.
She was 36 years old when she was executed on January 24, 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.