Maria Mandel

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Maria Mandel (January 10, 1912 – January 24, 1948) was infamous for her key role in the Holocaust as a top-ranking official at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp where she is believed to have been directly responsible for orders to kill over 500,000 female Jews, Gypsies, and political prisoners.

Mandel was born in Munzkirchen, Austria. On October 15, 1938, she joined the camp staff as an Aufseherin at Lichtenburg, an early concentration camp in Saxony where she worked with fifty other SS women. On May 15, 1939 she along with other guards and prisoners were sent to the newly opened Ravensbrück concentration camp near Berlin. She quickly impressed her superiors and in June 1942 became an SS-Oberaufseherin. She oversaw daily roll calls, assignments for Aufseherinnen and punishments such as beatings and floggings.

On October 7, 1942, Mandel was assigned to the Auschwitz II Birkenau camp in Poland where she became SS Lagerfuhrerin, a commandant under (male) SS Kommandant (commandant) Rudolf Höß. (A woman could never outrank a man.) Mandel controlled all the female Auschwitz camps and female subcamps including Hindenburg, Lichtenwerden, Budy and Rajsko. Her power over female prisoners (and subordinates) was absolute. Maria took a liking to Irma Grese, whom she promoted to head of the Hungarian women's camp at Birkenau. According to some accounts, Mandel often stood at the gate into Birkenau waiting for an inmate to turn and look at her: Any who did were taken out of the lines and never heard from again. In the Auschwitz camps Mandel was known as The Beast, and for the next two years she participated in selections for death and other documented abuses. She reportedly often chose so-called "pet" Jews for herself, keeping them from the gas chamber for a time until she tired of them, sending them to their death. Mandel is also said to have enjoyed selecting children to be killed. She created the Auschwitz orchestra to accompany roll calls, executions, selection and transports. She signed orders sending an estimated half a million women and children to their deaths in the gas chambers at Auschwitz I and II. In November 1944 she was assigned to the Mühldorf subcamp of Dachau concentration camp (Elisabeth Volkenrath became head of the crumbling Auschwitz empire of camps, which were liberated in early January 1945). In May 1945, Mandel fled from Mühldorf into the mountains of southern Bavaria to her birthplace and homeland of Munzkirchen, Austria.

The US Army arrested Mandel on August 10, 1945. Interrogations reportedly revealed her to be highly intelligent and dedicated to her work in the camps. She was handed over to Poland in November 1946 and in November 1947 she was tried in a Kraków courtroom and sentenced to death. Mandel was hanged on January 24, 1948 at age 36. Her last words were "It lives Poland."

[edit] External links

• Biography from the Jewish Virtual Library.
• Images & Bio-sketch (Text in German).

[edit] Literature

• Brown, D. P.: The Camp Women: The Female Auxiliaries Who Assisted the SS in Running the Nazi Concentration Camp System; Schiffer Publishing 2002; ISBN 0-7643-1444-0.