On March 12, 1938, German troops crossed into Austria and occupied the country without firing a single shot. Instead of armed resistance, they were met with cheering crowds and flowers. While thousands of Austrians welcomed Adolf Hitler on his journey to Linz and then Vienna, terrified Jews, left-wing supporters, and other opponents of the Nazi regime rushed toward the borders. Most of them were trapped in a rapidly Nazifying Austria.
In the following weeks, pogrom-like violence broke out across the country. Austrian Nazis and others beat, attacked, and humiliated Jewish people. They forced them to scrub streets, clean public toilets, and perform degrading exercises. Long lines formed at consulates throughout Vienna as many decided to try to leave Austria.
Among the Austrians welcoming the leader was a woman who would later become an SS senior overseer at the Auschwitz concentration camp. She would be responsible for the brutal torture and killing of thousands of innocent women and children during World War II. Her name was Maria Mandl.
Maria Mandl was born on January 10, 1912, in Münskirchen, then part of Austria-Hungary. She was the daughter of a master shoemaker. After finishing school, she worked as a household helper in Switzerland and Innsbruck. In 1937, she took a job at the Münskirchen post office.
Mandl was 26 years old when Adolf Hitler annexed Austria to the German Reich. The Anschluss took place between March 11 and 13, 1938. In September of that year, she moved to Munich, Germany. A month later, she began working at the Lichtenburg concentration camp.
She took the job because her uncle worked in concentration camps and because of the money. As a guard, she earned several times more than she had at the post office. Lichtenburg, housed in a Renaissance castle, was one of the first concentration camps built by the Nazis. From 1937 to 1939, it held only women.
Mandl’s specialty at Lichtenburg was stripping prisoners naked, tying them to wooden stakes, and beating 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 camp. It was the only major camp established by the Nazis exclusively for women. About 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Romani, and others. More than 92,000 of them died there.
At Ravensbrück, Maria Mandl supervised with a dog at her side. When someone displeased her, she set the dog on them to tear them apart. When she approached, prisoners whispered warnings to each other that Mandl was coming, and everyone fell silent. She always carried a whip, which she used to beat them, and she kicked them all over their bodies.
Once, Mandl brutally beat a prisoner who dared to pick up scraps of discarded food. On another occasion, she kicked and beat an elderly prisoner in a corridor near the camp cells until the woman collapsed on the stone floor. Mandl kept kicking her until the old prisoner died.
She often locked internees in cells wearing straitjackets and beat them until they lost consciousness. Her presence at Ravensbrück became a symbol of merciless cruelty and terror. Roll calls with her were among the worst experiences prisoners had to endure.
In early spring and autumn, when the ground was frozen, she forbade prisoners from wearing shoes. They were only allowed to wear them during work. Otherwise, they had to walk barefoot. Prisoners often had to stand barefoot from 4 a.m. through the roll call, which lasted until about 6 a.m. If a prisoner, usually an older woman, put a piece of paper under her feet to ease the pain, Mandl would punch her and kick her unconscious. Victims of such offenses were often carried to a dark cell or punishment block.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. In the spring of 1942, SS leadership decided to establish a women’s concentration camp at Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland. It was initially located in the main camp and moved to Birkenau in the summer of 1942.
From October 1942, Maria Mandl served as the head SS overseer at the women’s camp in Birkenau, where most imprisoned women were forced to work. Her control over both subordinates and prisoners, who called her “the beast,” was absolute. Mandl was known for her brutal treatment of prisoners, whom she beat and tortured without provocation.
Once, she struck a prisoner until blood flowed simply because the woman had her hands in her pockets. When the woman dared to do it again, Mandl beat her unconscious and then smashed her head against a wall. She also attacked the secretary of Edvard Beneš, the president of Czechoslovakia, for smoking a cigarette, then locked her in solitary confinement for three weeks. In another incident, when three prisoners went missing, Mandl beat and kicked their guard even after the guard lay motionless on the ground.
Maria Mandl was obsessed with harming Jewish people and used every opportunity to beat or kill them. Once, she saw a block leader beating Jewish prisoners with a stick at the entrance to a block so hard that they fell to the ground. As the women lay there, Mandl, her colleague Margot Drexel, and guards ran over. Mandl kicked the prisoners on the ground, pulled their hair, and shouted at Drexel: “Help me, these stinking Jewesses won’t leave on their own.”
On another occasion, Mandl and Drexel discovered that cabbage was being cooked with potatoes in the canteen of a work block. Prisoners in the kitchen had added cabbage to the potatoes to make extra food and gain more nutrition. Mandl and Drexel called the room elders and summoned two prisoners responsible for the food, Maria Tarnovska and Genovefa Uan. Mandl and Drexel began screaming and first beat Tarnovska. When she ran away, they turned on Uan.
They took turns punching her in the face as if she were a boxing bag. One beat her while the other rested. Uan began to lose consciousness and felt weak, but she did not fall. Then Mandl poured boiling soup on the floor and finally both women threw Uan into it and kicked her. The heat helped Uan regain consciousness, and she tried to get up. Mandl and Drexel, holding her by the shoulders, would not let her rise and held her in the boiling water. After a while, when they tired, they left Uan where she was and walked away.
Maria Mandl sometimes organized so-called delousing sessions. Prisoners were stripped naked in freezing cold and snow and held there for hours. After each delousing, the number of dead in the camp increased due to the freezing conditions. During washing in the washroom, SS members on Mandl’s orders burned prisoners with a red-hot iron, causing many to faint from severe pain and lack of oxygen.
In another case, a young prisoner named Mala Cimetbaum, who worked as an interpreter in the camp, escaped but was captured and sentenced to death by hanging. Maria Mandl offered to carry out the sentence herself because she wanted to hang Mala as a deterrent example. When the gallows were ready, about 6,000 prisoners and camp workers were assembled, and Mala was led out of her cell. Seeing what awaited her, Mala cut her veins with a razor blade. When an SS guard tried to snatch the razor, Mala struck him in the face with her bloody hand. On orders from Berlin, Maria Mandl ordered Mala to be burned alive in the crematorium.
Mandl also frequently imposed starvation as a punishment, denying prisoners bread for two to three days. During that time, she ordered those being punished to pour out the soup they were given. She held a particular hatred for Polish women. She often said: “You Polish pigs, you all came here to die.”
Maria Mandl also took part in selections and sent thousands of prisoners to the gas chambers. Zofia Červiá, a Holocaust survivor, described how Mandl behaved during one such selection. Mandl carried them out together with Dr. Josef Mengele and the head of protective custody camp, Franz Hösler. Wearing gloves and holding a stick, she pushed prisoners, many covered in sores, toward Mengele, who had the final say.
“They selected 3,000 women then, but instead of sending them straight to the gas chamber, they sent them to block 25, known as the death block,” Červiá said. A few days after that selection, Zofia went to block 25 for rags for delousing. When she reached the gate, she ran into Mandl and Franz Hösler, who were leaving the block in a good mood. Mandl told Hösler that they deserved it. When Zofia entered the block, she saw a large pile of corpses from which rats had torn pieces of flesh.
Mandl also participated in selections on the railway ramp, where SS doctors decided who was fit for work and who was to be killed immediately. Men and older boys were in one line, and women and children of both sexes in another. During these selections, Mandl cruelly tortured prisoners. She beat women, men, and children with a whip and kicked them blindly. She tore children from their mothers’ arms, and when mothers tried to get close to their children and defend them, Mandl beat and kicked them too.
When one young mother tried to reach her two-year-old child, who had been thrown onto a truck, Mandl kicked and beat her so brutally that she could not get up. After the war, one witness testified how she held her four-year-old child by the hand. Mandl approached her, tore the child away, and threw it onto a still-empty truck. The child injured its face and began to cry and call for its mother, who was in a group that was not loaded onto the trucks. When the mother tried to reach her crying child, Mandl began beating her so cruelly that the woman fell. Mandl continued kicking the mother even though she lay on the ground, and with her boots knocked out almost all of the woman’s teeth.
Once, in September 1943, Maria Mandl carried out a selection of long-term prisoners and ordered them all to go outside and strip naked. Mandl walked from block to block, examined the women, and sent aside those she did not like, usually those who were thin, emaciated, or had sores on their bodies. She then made the selected women, still naked, crowd into block 25, where they remained for seven days and nights without food or water. Throughout that time, terrible screams and moans came from the block.
When the doors of the block opened after seven days, there were more corpses than living people inside. Almost all the women had bitten-off fingers and breasts and gouged-out eyes. Both those who had died of hunger and the survivors were then sent to the crematorium. If any prisoner tried to bring water or food to block 25 during those seven days, they were arrested and died along with the others.
In Auschwitz, all prisoners called Maria Mandl “the woman of life and death.” She often went through prisoners’ medical records with a German doctor to identify those who had typhus. Those diagnosed with typhus were sent to the infirmary, from which they never returned. On one such occasion, a Jewish prisoner whose mother had been selected for gassing knelt and begged Mandl either to send her to the gas chamber too or to save her mother. In response, Mandl began beating and kicking her while laughing hysterically.
Maria Mandl often carried out personal inspections of prisoners and checks of beds in all blocks. Whenever she found a piece of clothing or food, she struck the prisoner in the face. Her blows were so strong that women fell to the ground after the first hit.
On another occasion, in late autumn 1944, Mandl noticed that prisoners waiting to be loaded onto a train to Germany were wearing two sweaters. She ordered them to undress completely, then told them to keep only their underwear, dress, and one sweater, leaving the rest behind. Without warmer clothing, they were loaded into freight cars that had no benches and not even straw on the floor, and sent deep into the Reich. An SS officer present was shocked by Mandl’s behavior. When he saw what she was doing with that transport, he argued with her and then left, disgusted.
For her services, Maria Mandl received the War Merit Cross, Second Class. In November 1944, she was sent to Mühldorf, a complex of subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp. The camps at Mühldorf were established to provide labor for underground facilities producing the Messerschmitt 262, a German fighter jet and bomber that was the world’s first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft. It is estimated that more than half of the prisoners held there died after deportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp or died on site from overwork, abuse, disease, or were shot. Prisoners often worked 10 to 12 hours a day, dragging heavy bags of cement and doing other demanding construction work.
Mandl fled before the liberation of Mühldorf by the Soviets on January 20, 1945. When she appeared in her hometown of Münskirchen, her father refused to let her live in his house. She sought refuge with her sister in a nearby town. On August 10, 1945, Mandl was arrested and interrogated by American soldiers. They described her as an intelligent, sophisticated, and at the same time cruel woman.
In 1946, Maria Mandl was extradited to Poland, where she was tried in the Auschwitz trial that began on November 24, 1947, and lasted one month. She spent several weeks in Kraków’s Montelupich prison waiting for the verdict of the Supreme National Court. In prison, she shared a cell with Therese Brandl, a former overseer at the Auschwitz camp, and Stanisława Rachwałowa, a Polish prisoner who survived Auschwitz and had been under Mandl’s command.
Rachwałowa had been arrested by post-war communist authorities in Poland as an anti-communist activist and sentenced to death. She recalled an incident a few days before the verdict when she was sent to the showers together with Maria Mandl and Therese Brandl. “In the afternoon, we were called to take a bath. Through the running water and clouds of steam, I kept my eyes on the German women. Suddenly I noticed that both of them were slowly approaching me,” Rachwałowa said.
Mandl came first, and Brandl followed closely. “Fear of the past seized me and left me frightened and defenseless. And there stood the former beast of Auschwitz, Maria Mandl. Only two steps away from me. Wet, small, and humble. And tears were streaming down her face. She spoke slowly, struggling with words, gasping for breath, but it was still clear. ‘Ich bitte um Vergebung,’ meaning ‘I ask for forgiveness.’”
Brandl, standing behind her, burst into tears. “I cried with them. I took their outstretched pleading hands and said: ‘In the name of the prisoners, I forgive you.’ At that moment, both threw themselves to their knees and began kissing my hands.”
Facing death, the former prisoner forgave Maria Mandl for her unheard-of crimes, but that did not help her escape justice. On December 22, 1947, the Polish Supreme National Court in Kraków sentenced Mandl to death by hanging. Her cruelty was again emphasized in the verdict, which stated: “The accused even tortured prisoners she had already selected for death.”
After the death sentence was pronounced, Mandl cried, prayed in her cell, and withdrew into herself. On January 24, 1948, Maria Mandl, then 36 years old, was hanged as the last of the group. Perhaps because she had witnessed the first executions, she showed the greatest resistance. Her execution turned into a grotesque scene.
When the former Auschwitz staff were hanged, the prosecutor, guards, and prison director were drunk. They had the most trouble with Mandl, whom they had to drag across the yard. During this, everyone laughed at her, mocked her, and made fun of her. When the guards taunted and ridiculed Maria Mandl, she just closed her eyes and said her last words: “Poland lives.”
Then Mandl, still resisting, was hanged. At 7:32 a.m., her execution was complete. Her body was subsequently given to medical students at Kraków University as demonstration material. Jíří Ludvíkovský, who took an anatomy exam in June 1949 on Mandl’s well-preserved body, later recalled: “I saw how Maria Mandl died, because on her neck there was a deep, distinct mark from the noose. Her body remained intact, and despite the effects of formalin, every muscle was clearly visible. From that perspective, Mandl was a fantastic teaching exhibit for medical students.”