12 March 1938, Austria.
German troops cross the border without resistance, and crowds gather to cheer and wave flags.
Flowers are thrown, church bells ring, and the new order announces itself with confidence and noise.
At the same time, fear spreads quietly through Jewish homes, left wing circles, and families marked as enemies of the new regime.
Jobs are lost, loyalties are tested, and opportunities open for those willing to serve power without question.
Among the many Austrians whose lives will be reshaped by this moment is a young woman who will later become one of the most feared figures in the Nazi concentration camp system.
Her name is Maria Mandl.
Maria Mandl was born on 10 January 1912 in the village of Münzkirchen, then part of Austria-Hungary.
She grew up in a Catholic family that was well known locally and considered respectable.
Her father Franz Mandl worked as a master shoemaker and supported the Christian Social Party, openly opposing the Nazis in Austria.
Her mother Anna Streibl was a housewife and was raising Maria and her three other siblings.
Maria´s mother also suffered from depressive episodes and had a nervous breakdown during Mandl’s childhood.
Mandl attended school but her formal education ended early.
At the age of twelve, she was withdrawn from school to help on the farm, a common practice in rural communities of that time.
Later, she graduated from a Catholic boarding school, but was unable to find steady employment.
In her late teens and early twenties, Mandl moved repeatedly.
She worked as a domestic servant in the town of Brig in southern Switzerland, then she became home-sick and went back to Austria, where she worked as a chambermaid in the city of Innsbruck, before returning home to care for her parents.
After she came home, she found secure employment at the local post office and became engaged to a soldier of the German army.
Her prospects were modest but stable.
The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938 shattered this stability – Mandl lost her job because of her family’s political background, and her fiancé ended their engagement, fearing that association with her could harm his future within the Third Reich.
Mandl found herself suddenly excluded from normal life in a rapidly Nazifying society.
She learned soon that the new system rewarded obedience and punished those who did not conform.
In September 1938, Mandl left Austria and moved to Munich to live with her uncle, a policeman, with the intention of having him get her a position in the police force.
None were available, however, and he instead encouraged her to apply for the position at the Lichtenburg concentration camp in the town of Prettin.
Later she would say that she took the position only because the salary was higher than that of a nurse, and that she had known “nothing” about concentration camps.
On 15 October 1938, she began working as a guard at Lichtenburg concentration camp, one of the earliest camps operated by the SS, the Nazi paramilitary unit also responsible for the guarding of the camps.
At that time, the camp held only female prisoners.
At Lichtenburg, Mandl underwent ideological training and swore loyalty to the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler.
She undertook this training with her cousin, Maria Gruber, but the latter resigned early on because she was disgusted by the violence at the camp.
On the other hand, Maria Mandl quickly adapted to the camp environment and started to torment the prisoners.
According to testimonies from survivors Emilie Neu and Lina Haag, Mandl subjected prisoners to whippings, beatings, and strenuous exercises.
In one incident, Mandl struck a prisoner repeatedly with a metal key until she lost consciousness, then dragged her across the camp and put her in a solitary cell.
On 15 May 1939, Mandl was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp, the main women’s camp in the Nazi system.
More than 130 000 women passed through the camp during it´s existence, and the majority of them did not survive.
In Ravensbrück, Maria Mandl would patrol the camp with a dog, and if she took a disliking to someone, she would set the dog on the prisoner until the inmate was torn to pieces.
When she approached, prisoners would whisper warnings that Mandl was coming, and everyone would fall silent.
She always carried a whip, using it to beat and kick prisoners all over their bodies.
On one occasion, Mandl viciously beat a prisoner who dared to pick up scraps of discarded food.
On another occasion, she brutally kicked and beat an elderly prisoner in the corridor near the camp cells, causing the woman to collapse on the stone floor.
Mandl continued to kick her until the old prisoner was dead.
She often confined prisoners in cells with straitjackets and beat them unconscious.
At Ravensbrück, Maria Mandl’s presence was a symbol of relentless cruelty and terror, making roll calls with her among the worst experiences inmates had to endure.
In the early spring and autumn, when the ground was covered with frost, she forbade prisoners from wearing shoes, allowing them only during work.
Otherwise, they had to walk barefoot.
Prisoners often had to stand barefoot from 4:00 a.
m.
through the entire roll call, until about 6:00 a.
m.
If a prisoner, usually an older woman, placed a piece of paper under her feet for some relief, Mandl would punch and kick her senseless.
For this offense, the beaten victims were often carried away to a dark cell or the penal block.
The Second World War started on 1 September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland.
As the war expanded, the concentration camp system became central to German occupation and policy of mass murder.
In 1942, the SS leadership decided to establish a large women’s camp at Auschwitz and Mandl was promoted and transferred to Auschwitz II – Birkenau, where she became the chief guard of the women’s camp.
At Birkenau, Mandl exercised near total power.
Her only superior was the camp commandant Rudolf Höss, who trusted her completely.
In the camp, she controlled all female guards and thousands of prisoners and decided who would live die.
According to survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Mandl would stand in front of the camp’s front gate while prisoners were lined up.
If a prisoner made eye contact with her, they were removed from the line and killed.
She also signed death lists on a weekly basis and showed particular cruelty toward Jewish prisoners and Polish women.
She tore children from their mothers’ arms and sent them to be killed.
When mothers tried to follow, she beat them until they collapsed.
Mandl also embodied the contradictions of the camp system.
She organized the famous Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, which was formed in 1943 from the inmates in the camp.
In this way Mandl was cynically forcing music into a place built for mass murder.
Prisoners played as others marched to forced labour, returned exhausted, or were led to their deaths.
Concerts were also held, every Sunday, for SS personnel.
What is interesting in Mandl’s story of cruelty is that a small number of women survived because of their role in the orchestra, while millions of others were murdered.
Under Mandl’s authority, culture and killing existed side by side.
As the Soviet Red Army advanced in late 1944, Mandl was transferred to the Mühldorf concentration camp complex, a subcamp system of Dachau concentration camp.
She arrived in December 1944.
At Mühldorf, prisoners were worked to death constructing underground factories for German jet aircraft like Messerschmitt Me 262.
Conditions were brutal, food was scarce, and mortality was extreme.
In this brutal territory Mandl started an intimate relationship with Walter Adolf Langleist, the commandant of the Mühldorf camp.
As Allied forces closed in the spring of 1945, Mandl and Langliest fled.
Soon afterwards, she turned up in her birthplace of Münzkirchen.
However, her father refused to let her stay in her parents’ house, so she sought refuge with her sister.
On 10 August 1945, she was arrested and imprisoned at the premises of the former Dachau concentration camp, where she was interrogated by the Americans, and later extradited to Poland.
She was imprisoned in Kraków and tried before the Polish Supreme National Tribunal during the Auschwitz Trial, which started on 24 November 1947.
A total of 44 SS personnel were accused, with Mandl being one of only five women brought before the tribunal.
During the trial, survivor testimonies described her beatings, selections, and killings in detail.
At first, Mandl denied responsibility, but later, she admitted.
Based on the number of lists signed with her name, Mandl is believed to have been complicit in the deaths of approximately 500,000 people during the war.
On 22 December 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Kraków sentenced Maria Mandl to death by hanging.
Mandl decided to fight for her life and begged for mercy asking for clemency but the Polish president Bolesław Bierut rejected her request.
In the days leading up to her execution, she cried, prayed in her cell and withdrew into herself.
On 24 January 1948, the 36-year-old Maria Mandl was the last in the group to be hanged and because she had probably witnessed the first executions, she showed the most resistance.
As former Auschwitz staff members were being executed, the prosecutor, prison guards, and the prison director were all intoxicated.
Mandl proved the most difficult to handle —screaming and resisting as the guards forcibly dragged her across the courtyard toward the gallows – her execution turned into a grotesque scene.
During this time, they were all laughing and ridiculing Mandl and poking fun at her.
As the guards teased and taunted Maria Mandl, she just closed her eyes, and said her last words “Poland Lives”.
Afterwards, Mandl, still struggling, was hanged.
At 7:32 AM her execution was completed.
Hours after her execution, Mandl’s body was sent to the Jagiellonian University Medical College for students to experiment on for a six-week period.
On 6 March 1948, her body was moved to the Rakowicki Cemetery in Kraków and buried in a wooden box at an unmarked spot.
Mandl’s father had been aware of the atrocities his daughter committed and did not request for her remains to be sent home.
Her mother had already died by that time, but while she lived, she prayed for her daughter’s eternal soul.
Yet prayers could not erase the harm done, nor the lives lost because of Mandl’s actions.
