Maria Mandel was born on January 10, 1912, in Münzkirchen, then part of Austria-Hungary. The daughter of a master shoemaker, she worked as domestic help in Switzerland and Innsbruck before taking a job at the Münzkirchen post office in 1937.
When German troops crossed into Austria on March 12, 1938, they were met not with resistance but with cheers. The annexation, known as the Anschluss, took place over three days. Mandel was 26 years old at the time.
In September 1938, she moved to Munich. One month later, she began working at the Lichtenburg Concentration Camp. She took the job because her uncle had worked in the camps and because the pay was several times higher than her postal salary.
Lichtenburg was housed in a Renaissance castle and was among the first concentration camps built by the Nazis. From 1937 to 1939, it held only female prisoners. Mandel’s specialty there was stripping prisoners naked, tying them to wooden posts, and beating them until she could no longer lift her arm.
On May 15, 1939, Mandel was transferred to Ravensbrück, the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis. Some 132,000 women passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Romani people, and others. More than 92,000 of them perished.
At Ravensbrück, Mandel patrolled with her dog. If she took a disliking to someone, she would set the animal on the prisoner until the inmate was torn to pieces. Prisoners whispered warnings when she approached, and everyone fell silent.
She always carried a whip and used it to beat prisoners across their bodies. On one occasion, she beat a prisoner who dared to pick up scraps of discarded food. On another, she kicked and beat an elderly prisoner in a corridor until the woman collapsed and died.
Mandel often confined prisoners in cells with straitjackets and beat them unconscious. During roll calls in frost-covered weather, she forbade prisoners from wearing shoes. They stood barefoot from 4 a.m. until about 6 a.m. If an older prisoner placed paper under her feet for relief, Mandel would punch and kick her senseless.
In the spring of 1942, the SS leadership decided to establish a women’s concentration camp at Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland. From October 1942, Mandel served as SS chief guard at the Birkenau women’s camp. Prisoners called her “the Beast.”
Her control was absolute. She beat and tortured prisoners without provocation. Once she assaulted a prisoner until she bled simply for keeping her hands in her pockets. When the woman did it again, Mandel beat her unconscious and bashed her head against the wall.
She attacked the secretary of Edvard Beneš, the president of Czechoslovakia, for smoking a cigarette, then confined her to solitary confinement for three weeks. When three prisoners went missing, Mandel beat and kicked their overseer even as she lay helpless on the ground.
Mandel was obsessed with hurting Jews and seized any opportunity to beat or kill them. On one occasion, she saw a block leader beating Jewish inmates with a stick. As the women lay on the ground, Mandel and her fellow overseer Margot Drexel ran over, kicked the prisoners, and dragged them by their hair.
In another incident, Mandel and Drexel discovered cabbage being boiled with potatoes in a working block’s dining room. Prisoners in the kitchen had added the cabbage to make an extra meal. Mandel and Drexel summoned the room elders, Maria Taranova and Gina Anan, and began beating them.
They took turns punching Anan in the face, boxing style. One would beat while the other rested. Anan began to lose consciousness but did not fall. Mandel poured the boiling soup on the floor, and both women threw Anan into the boiling water, kicking her. The heat revived her, but they held her down by the shoulders and kept her in the boiling water until they grew tired and left.
Mandel also organized so-called delousings where prisoners were stripped naked in the cold and snow and kept there for hours. Death tolls rose from the freezing conditions. On her order, an SS man scorched female prisoners with a hot iron in the bathhouse, causing many to faint from pain.
A young prisoner named Mala Zimetbaum, who worked as an interpreter, fled but was caught and sentenced to death by hanging. Mandel volunteered to carry out the sentence herself. When Mala was led out and saw the gallows, she cut her veins with a razor. A guard tried to seize the blade, but Mala slapped the guard’s face with her bloody hand. Following orders from Berlin, Mandel ordered Mala to be burned alive in the crematorium.
Mandel frequently imposed hunger punishments, depriving prisoners of bread for two or three days. During these punishments, she ordered prisoners to pour out the soup they were supposed to receive. She held a special hatred for Polish women, often saying, “You Polish pigs, you all came here to die.”
Mandel also participated in selections and sent thousands of prisoners to the gas chambers. Holocaust survivor Zofia Chinska described how Mandel conducted selections with Dr. Josef Mengele and camp leader Franz Hössler. Wearing gloves and holding a stick, Mandel pushed prisoners covered in ulcers toward Mengele, who had the final say.
In one selection, 3,000 women were chosen. Instead of being sent directly to the gas chamber, they were sent to Block 25, known as the block of death. Days later, Chinska went to the block to fetch rags. She encountered Mandel and Hössler leaving in high spirits. Mandel said, “They deserve this.” Inside, Chinska saw a large pile of corpses with fragments of flesh gnawed away by rats.
Mandel also took part in selections on the rail ramp. She beat women, men, and children with a whip and kicked them blindly. She tore children from their mothers’ arms. When mothers tried to defend their children, Mandel beat and kicked them.
One defendant testified after the war how Mandel tore a four-year-old child from its mother’s hand and threw the child onto an empty cart. The child was wounded in the face and began crying for its mother. When the mother tried to reach the child, Mandel beat her so cruelly that the woman fell. Mandel continued kicking her and knocked out almost all her teeth with her shoes.
In September 1943, Mandel carried out a selection of veteran prisoners. She ordered them to strip naked and went from block to block, setting aside those she did not like, typically the thin and emaciated or those with ulcers. The chosen women were crammed into Block 25, where they stayed for seven days and nights without food or water.
Horrible screams and groans came from the block throughout that period. When the door was opened, there were more corpses than living people inside. Almost all had bitten fingers and breasts and plucked out eyes. Both the dead and the surviving prisoners were sent to the crematorium. Any prisoner who tried to bring food or water to Block 25 was arrested and perished along with the rest.
Prisoners referred to Mandel as the “Mistress of Life and Death.” Often with a German doctor, she went through medical records to identify those ill with typhus. Those diagnosed were sent to a sick room from which they never returned.
On one occasion, a Jewish prisoner whose mother had been chosen for the gas chamber begged Mandel to either send her too or save her mother. Mandel beat and kicked her, laughing hysterically.
Mandel often conducted personal searches of prisoners and inspected beds throughout the blocks. Whenever she discovered any item of clothing or food, she struck the prisoners across the face. Her blows were so strong that prisoners fell to the ground after the first hit.
In late autumn 1944, Mandel noticed prisoners from a transport destined for Germany wearing two sweaters as they waited to board a train. She ordered them to strip completely, then told them to wear only underwear, dresses, and one sweater. Stripped of warmer clothing, the prisoners were loaded into freight wagons with no benches or straw and sent into the depths of the Reich.
An SS officer present was shocked by her behavior. He argued with her before driving away in disgust.
For her service, Mandel received the War Merit Cross, Second Class, in November 1944. She was then sent to Mühldorf, a subcamp complex of the Dachau concentration camp. The camps provided labor for underground installations producing the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft.
More than half of the prisoners held at Mühldorf perished following deportation to Auschwitz or died from overwork, abuse, shootings, and disease. Prisoners frequently worked 10 to 12 hour days hauling heavy bags of cement and carrying out other arduous construction tasks.
Mandel fled before Mühldorf was liberated by the Soviets on January 27, 1945. She turned up in her birthplace, Münzkirchen, but her father refused to allow her to live in his house. She sought refuge with her sister nearby.
On August 10, 1945, Mandel was arrested and interrogated by U.S. soldiers. She was described as intelligent, sophisticated, and cruel at the same time.
In 1946, Mandel was extradited to Poland, where she was tried at the Auschwitz trial. The trial began on November 24, 1947, and lasted one month. She spent weeks at the Montelupich prison in Kraków awaiting the verdict of the Polish Supreme National Tribunal.
While in prison, Mandel shared a cell with Teresa Brandl, a former Auschwitz guard, and Stanislawa Ralova, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz who had been an inmate under Mandel’s administration. Ralova had been arrested by Poland’s postwar communist authorities as an anti-communist activist and sentenced to death.
Ralova recalled an occasion days before the verdict when she was ordered to take a bath together with Mandel and Brandl. Through the steam, she watched the two German women approach her. Mandel led the way, with Brandl following closely.
Ralova said, “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 in meaning: ‘I am asking for forgiveness.’”
Brandl, standing behind her, was crying uncontrollably. Ralova cried with them. She took their outstretched pleading hands and said, “I forgive you on behalf of the prisoners.” Both women threw themselves on their knees and began kissing her hands.
The forgiveness did not help Mandel escape justice. On December 22, 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal sentenced her to death by hanging. The verdict emphasized her cruelty, noting that she even mistreated female prisoners who had already been singled out on the selection path to death.
After the sentence was pronounced, Mandel cried, prayed in her cell, and withdrew into herself.
On January 24, 1948, Maria Mandel, then 36 years old, was the last in the group to be hanged. Because she had likely witnessed the earlier executions, she showed the most resistance. Her execution turned into a grotesque scene.
The prosecutor, the guards, and the prison director were all drunk. They had the most trouble with Mandel because they had to drag her through the courtyard while laughing, ridiculing her, and poking fun at her. As the guards teased and taunted her, Mandel closed her eyes and said her last words: “Poland lives.”
Still struggling, she was hanged at 7:32 a.m. Her body was subsequently made available to medical students at the University of Kraków as illustrative material.
A student who took an anatomy exam on her well-preserved body in June 1949 later recalled seeing how Mandel died. A deep, clear trace of the crease from the hanging remained on her neck. Her body remained in one piece, and despite the effects of formalin, each muscle could be clearly seen.
There were no tears shed for Maria Mandel.