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Maria Mandl (, ; sometimes erroneously spelled Mandel; 10 January 1912 – 24 January 1948) was an Austrian-born Holocaust perpetrator and convicted war criminal. From 1942 until her arrest in 1945, she served as the Schutzhaftlagerführerin (camp leader) at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp. She also held positions at the Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück camps as Aufseherin (overseer) and Oberaufseherin (head overseer), respectively.
Mandl was born in Münzkirchen, Austria-Hungary, into a financially well-off Catholic family affiliated with the Christian Social Party (CSP). Following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, she moved to Munich and found work as an Aufseherin at the Lichtenburg concentration camp. There, she subjected prisoners to fatal beatings and floggings. In 1939, she was transferred to Ravensbrück, where she was promoted to Oberaufseherin. She oversaw the training program for prospective Aufseherinnen and worked alongside Dorothea Binz in the camp's punishment block. Mandl's final promotion came in 1942, when she was transferred to Auschwitz II-Birkenau and given the position of Schutzhaftlagerführerin under the command of Rudolf Höss. As the Red Army advanced toward the Auschwitz complex in late 1944, Mandl was transferred to the Mettenheim camp. In May 1945, as the United States Air Force invaded and bombed the area, Mandl fled with her lover, Kommandant Walter Adolf Langleist, and a Jewish prisoner known as Mose. After evading arrest for three months, Mandl and Langleist were apprehended by the American military police in August 1945 at Langleist's home in Hof.
Mandl was convicted of crimes against humanity at the Auschwitz trial in Kraków in December 1947. Based on the number of death lists she signed, it is believed that she had been complicit in the deaths of approximately 500,000 prisoners during her tenure at Birkenau. In January 1948, she was executed by hanging at the age of thirty-six. Her last words were "Polska żyje" ("Poland lives").
On 20 July 1924, at the age of twelve, Mandl was withdrawn from school without completing an exit exam to help on the family farm. In 1927, she was admitted to a Catholic boarding school in Neuhaus am Inn, from which she graduated. A former classmate of Mandl's, Paula Bauer, described her as having been "cheerful" and "very nice". After graduating in 1930, Mandl struggled to find work locally, prompting her to move to Brig, Switzerland, where she found a position as a housekeeper and cook for thirteen months. She eventually became homesick and returned to Münzkirchen to live with her parents. In 1934, she found work as a chambermaid at a private villa in Innsbruck, but in 1936 once again returned home due to her parents' declining health. That same year, she was hired at the local post office and became engaged to a Wehrmacht soldier.
After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Mandl's engagement ended, and she lost her job at the post office. As a Third Reich soldier, her fiancé believed that her family's affiliation with the CSP could harm his reputation and affect his chances of finding employment in the civil service in the future. Mandl had been fired from her job for similar reasons; her family was openly opposed to the Third Reich, and she herself had no allegiance to the Nazi Party.
Mandl began working at the camp on 15 October. She completed a training program structured around Nazi ideology and took a twenty-question exam on geography, history, and dates significant to the Nazi Party. During her first three months as Aufseherin, she was under the supervision of an experienced guard. Mandl had undergone training with her cousin, Maria Gruber, but the latter resigned early on because she was disgusted by the violence at the camp.
Mandl worked under Kommandant Max Koegel and Oberaufseherin Johanna Langefeld. According to testimonies from survivors Emilie Neu and Lina Haag, Mandl subjected prisoners to whippings, beatings, and strenuous exercises—a practice referred to as "sport" in both victim and perpetrator accounts. 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. Another survivor, unnamed, recalled an encounter with Mandl when the woman was still new. The survivor had told the latter that she was "too pretty to play supervisor," to which Mandl replied, "No I swore the oath to the Führer, I'm staying".
In early 1940, Mandl, along with Oberaufseherin Dorothea Binz, was assigned to the on-camp jail referred to as the "cell block" or "punishment block". It was here that prisoners were flogged, receiving twenty-five strikes on their buttocks. Austrian survivor Marko Feingold later recalled how he and his brother endured this abuse five times per day, receiving twenty-five strikes every time. In an interrogation following her arrest, Mandl claimed that prisoners in the block were only kept in cells for up to a month and were provided with coffee and bread every day. However, survivors' testimonies contradict this statement, describing how food had been withheld.
In 1941, Mandl became a member of the National Socialist Women's League. In April 1942, she was promoted to the rank of Oberaufseherin following Langefeld's transfer to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in March, as the latter had been unable to maintain "brutality and structure" within the camp.
The cruelty Mandl had subjected prisoners to in Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück continued. At Birkenau, when new prisoners arrived, she used a cane to extract expensive items and jewelry hidden in women's vaginas. She took these items back with her to Münzkirchen when visiting her family and kept them hidden inside a drawer. According to survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Mandl would stand in front of the camp's front gate whilst prisoners were lined up. If a prisoner made eye contact with her, they were removed from the line and killed. She also tested prisoners returning from outside work details by holding a cane fifty centimeters above the ground and forcing every person to jump over it. Those who succeeded were allowed to proceed to roll call, while those who failed were sent to the gas chamber. Moreover, survivor Regina Lebensfeldová-Hofstädterová, who had been a typist in the camp's political department, stated that Mandl referred to prisoners as mistbienen (dung beetles). Over the next two years, Mandl signed death lists on a weekly basis and partook in selections alongside SS doctors.
Mandl provided care to a select few children in Birkenau, giving them extra food and engaging them in activities like dancing and singing. Survivor Ella Lingens-Reiner has attested to this, having recalled witnessing two children leaving Mandl's office with cookies and chocolate. Lingens-Reiner has also stated that Mandl once asked a pregnant German prisoner to give her the child after its birth, because she herself was not able to have children. Her alleged infertility has since been suggested as an explanation as to why she behaved differently towards the children at the camp. Conversely, she had also carried a two-year-old Polish boy to be killed in the gas chamber herself after having clothed and fed him for several days.
The orchestra performed at the entrance of Birkenau as prisoners left for and returned from work details. The orchestra also performed in the hospital block and in the showers. Concerts were also held for SS members every Sunday for the camp personnel. During the winter season, members of the orchestra were not required to stand outside for roll calls and were instead counted inside their barracks. They were also allowed to shower daily and were given proper bedding, as well as tables to eat on. For concerts, women were given uniforms consisting of a dark blue skirt, white blouse, black stockings, and a gray-and-blue striped jacket made from the material of their prison uniforms. By the end of June, the orchestra had grown to twenty members, and by 1944, it had reached its peak of forty-two.
In August 1943, Czajkowska was replaced as conductor of the orchestra by Austrian violinist Alma Rosé, the daughter of Arnold Rosé and niece of Gustav Mahler. Mandl arranged for Rosé to be transferred from Auschwitz I, where she had been imprisoned since July, to Birkenau for the sole purpose of having her lead the orchestra. According to testimonies from surviving orchestra members, Mandl had "genuine respect" for Rosé and would call her "Frau Alma". Moreover, when Rosé arrived at Birkenau, Mandl had taken it upon herself to change the woman's classification from "Dutch Jew" to "Mischling" ("part Jew"), so she had a more respectable standing as head of the orchestra. Additionally, on one occasion, when Rosé became ill Mandl allowed her to rest in a private room. On another, she assured Rosé that she would be "the last" to be sent to the gas chamber. However, Mandl had also become aggressive with Rosé at one point when the latter recruited more Jewish women into the orchestra, yelling at Rosé that she did not want to have a "Jewish orchestra" and accusing her of "scheming against Polish women".
On 2 April 1944, Rosé became sick and delirious. Mandl once again gave her a private room, this time in the hospital block. Rosé died three days later, on 5 April, at the age of thirty-eight. The cause of death is unknown, though botulism and food poisoning has since been suspected. Mandl openly mourned Rosé's death and allowed all members of the orchestra to see her one last time.
In April 1945, the United States Air Force bombed the Mettenheim camp, which was then followed by a ground invasion on 1 May. Mandl and Langleist fled with a Jewish inmate, only known as Mose, amidst gunfire and temporarily sought refuge in the woods. They subsequently went into hiding in Mandl's home in Innviertel for a couple weeks. In July, Mandl returned to her family home in Münzkirchen to stay there, but her father did not let her inside the house. Still with Langleist and Mose, Mandl was able to find them refuge at her sister's farm in Łuck, where they stayed for three days. Mandl would later allege that Mose "betrayed her" and Langleist within this timeframe to "take revenge for harm caused by different people". In August, Langleist was arrested by the American military police after survivor Max Katler identified him. Mandl was arrested soon after at Langleist's home in Hof.
Mandl wrote an appeal for clemency to Polish president Bolesław Bierut, claiming innocence; her lawyers also attempted to get her pardoned but their request was rejected. In the days leading up to her execution, she spent her time praying and teaching herself Polish. She also sought forgiveness from anti-Communist activist , who was formerly imprisoned in Auschwitz and later incarcerated in Montelupich upon being sentenced to death by communist authorities.
On 24 January 1948, at 7:32 A.M., Mandl was executed by hanging at the age of thirty-six. She had allegedly resisted against the guards who escorted her, and her final words, spoken in Polish, were "Polska żyje" ("Poland lives"). She was the fifth person executed that morning, after Arthur Liebehenschel, Hans Aumeier, Maximilian Grabner, and Karl Möckel. In total, twenty-one Nazis were executed that day. Unlike some of the men's, Mandl's hanging was not filmed.
In November 1975, Mandl's death certificate was recovered. Issued by the District Court of Ried im Innkreis, the document claimed that she had died in a concentration camp as a prisoner and regarded her as a "victim of National Socialism". Lawyer and the Austrian Mauthausen Committee demanded for corrections to be made. It was not until April 2017 that the Ried im Innkreis regional court amended the certificate to reflect Mandl's role in the Holocaust.
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