She Cried and Begged at the End: Ex€cution of N@zi Psych0 Maria Mandl
On March 12, 1938, German troops crossed into Austria without resistance. Crowds gathered in the streets to cheer, wave flags, and throw flowers as church bells rang across towns and cities. The new order announced itself loudly and confidently. At the same time, fear spread quietly through Jewish households, left-wing circles, and families already marked as enemies of the regime. Jobs were lost, loyalties tested, and opportunities opened for those willing to serve power without hesitation or doubt.
Among the many Austrians whose lives were transformed by the Anschluss was a young woman who would later become one of the most feared figures in the Nazi concentration camp system: Maria Mandl.
Maria Mandl was born on January 10, 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 who raised Maria and her three siblings. Mandl’s childhood was marked by instability. Her mother suffered from depressive episodes and experienced a nervous breakdown during Maria’s early years.
Mandl attended school, but her formal education ended early. At the age of 12, she was withdrawn from school to help on the family farm, a common practice in rural communities at the time. She later graduated from a Catholic boarding school but struggled to find steady employment. In her late teens and early twenties, she moved repeatedly. She worked as a domestic servant in Brig, in southern Switzerland, before becoming homesick and returning to Austria. There, she found employment as a chambermaid in Innsbruck, only to return again to Münzkirchen to care for her parents.
After returning home, Mandl secured a stable position at the local post office and became engaged to a soldier in the German army. Her prospects were modest but secure. This stability was abruptly destroyed by the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938. Mandl lost her job because of her family’s political background, and her fiancé ended their engagement, fearing that association with her could damage his future within the Third Reich. She found herself suddenly excluded from normal life in a society rapidly reshaped by Nazification.
Mandl quickly learned that the new system rewarded obedience and punished those who failed to conform. In September 1938, she left Austria and moved to Munich to live with her uncle, a policeman. She hoped he could secure her a position in the police force, but no such posts were available. Instead, he encouraged her to apply for work at Lichtenburg concentration camp, located in the town of Prettin.
Later, Mandl claimed that she accepted the position only because the salary was higher than that of a nurse and that she knew nothing about concentration camps. On October 15, 1938, she began working as a guard at Lichtenburg, one of the earliest concentration camps operated by the SS. At that time, the camp held exclusively female prisoners.
At Lichtenburg, Mandl underwent ideological training and swore loyalty to the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler. She completed this training alongside her cousin, Maria Gruber. Gruber resigned early, repulsed by the violence she witnessed. Maria Mandl, by contrast, adapted quickly to the camp environment and began actively tormenting prisoners.
According to survivor testimonies from Emilie Neu and Lina Haag, Mandl subjected inmates to whippings, beatings, and forced physical exercises. In one documented incident, she struck a prisoner repeatedly with a metal key until the woman lost consciousness, dragged her across the camp grounds, and placed her in solitary confinement. Violence was not an exception but a defining feature of Mandl’s conduct.
On May 15, 1939, Mandl was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp, the principal women’s concentration camp in the Nazi system. More than 130,000 women passed through Ravensbrück during its existence, and the majority did not survive. There, Mandl’s cruelty escalated further. She patrolled the camp with a dog and, if she took a personal dislike to a prisoner, set the animal on her until the victim was torn apart. When Mandl approached, prisoners whispered warnings and fell silent.
She carried a whip at all times, using it to beat and kick prisoners across their bodies. She viciously assaulted inmates for attempting to collect scraps of discarded food. On one occasion, she brutally beat and kicked an elderly woman in a corridor near the camp cells until the prisoner collapsed on the stone floor. Mandl continued kicking her until the woman died. She frequently confined prisoners in cells wearing straitjackets and beat them unconscious.
Mandl’s presence at Ravensbrück became synonymous with terror. Roll calls conducted under her supervision were among the most dreaded experiences for prisoners. In early spring and autumn, when frost covered the ground, she forbade inmates from wearing shoes except during work assignments. At other times, they were forced to walk barefoot. Prisoners were required to stand barefoot from 4:00 a.m. through roll call, often until 6:00 a.m. Older women who attempted to place scraps of paper under their feet for relief were beaten senseless and carried away to punishment cells or the penal block.
The outbreak of the Second World War on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, transformed the concentration camp system into a central instrument of occupation and mass murder. As the war expanded, the SS leadership reorganized and enlarged the camp network. In 1942, it was decided to establish a vast women’s camp at Auschwitz. Maria 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. She controlled all female guards and tens of thousands of prisoners and made decisions that directly determined who would live and who would die. Survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch later recalled that Mandl would stand at the front gate as prisoners were lined up. Any inmate who made eye contact with her was pulled from the line and killed.
Mandl regularly signed death lists, often on a weekly basis, and displayed particular cruelty toward Jewish prisoners and Polish women. She tore children from their mothers’ arms and sent them to be murdered. When mothers attempted to follow their children, she beat them until they collapsed. Her authority embodied the absolute arbitrariness of power within the camp system, where survival depended entirely on the whims of SS personnel.
At the same time, Mandl represented one of the most disturbing contradictions of Auschwitz. In 1943, she organized the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, composed of female prisoners. Music was forced into a place designed for systematic killing. The orchestra played as prisoners marched to forced labor, returned exhausted, or were led to their deaths. Concerts were also held on Sundays for SS personnel. Under Mandl’s rule, culture and murder existed side by side, and a small number of women survived solely because their musical skills made them temporarily useful.
As the Soviet Red Army advanced westward in late 1944, Mandl was transferred to the Mühldorf concentration camp, a subcamp complex of Dachau concentration camp. She arrived in December 1944. At Mühldorf, prisoners were worked to death constructing underground factories for German jet aircraft, including the Messerschmitt Me 262. Conditions were brutal, food was scarce, and mortality rates were extreme.
During this period, Mandl entered into an intimate relationship with Walter Adolf Langleist, the commandant of the Mühldorf camp. As Allied forces closed in during the spring of 1945, Mandl and Langleist fled. Shortly afterward, Mandl returned to her birthplace of Münzkirchen. Her father, fully aware of the crimes she had committed, refused to allow her to stay in the family home. She instead sought refuge with her sister.
On August 10, 1945, Mandl was arrested and imprisoned at the site of the former Dachau concentration camp. She was interrogated by American authorities and later extradited to Poland. She was imprisoned in Kraków and brought before the Polish Supreme National Tribunal during the Auschwitz Trial, which began on November 24, 1947. A total of 44 former SS personnel were charged. Mandl was one of only 5 women among the accused.
During the proceedings, survivor testimonies detailed her beatings, selections, and killings with precision. Initially, Mandl denied responsibility for these acts. Over time, she admitted her role. Based on the number of death lists bearing her signature, she was deemed complicit in the deaths of approximately 500,000 people.
On December 22, 1947, the tribunal sentenced Maria Mandl to death by hanging. She sought clemency and pleaded for mercy, but the Polish president, Bolesław Bierut, rejected her appeal. In the days leading up to her execution, Mandl cried, prayed in her cell, and withdrew into herself.
On January 24, 1948, Maria Mandl was led to her execution. At 36 years of age, she was the last of the condemned group to be hanged. Having likely witnessed the earlier executions, she offered the strongest resistance. Former Auschwitz personnel were executed in sequence, while the prosecutor, prison guards, and the prison director were intoxicated. Mandl’s execution devolved into a grotesque spectacle. She screamed, resisted, and struggled as guards forcibly dragged her across the courtyard toward the gallows. Those present laughed, mocked her, and ridiculed her fear.
As she was taunted and pushed forward, Mandl closed her eyes and spoke her final words: “Poland lives.” Still resisting, she was hanged. At 7:32 a.m., her execution was completed.
Hours later, Mandl’s body was transferred to the Medical College of Jagiellonian University, where it was used for anatomical study by students over a six-week period. On March 6, 1948, her remains were moved to Rakowicki Cemetery and buried in a wooden box in an unmarked grave. Her father, fully aware of the crimes his daughter had committed, did not request that her body be returned to Austria. Her mother had already died by that time, though while she lived she prayed for her daughter’s eternal soul.
No prayer could undo the harm inflicted by Maria Mandl, nor restore the lives destroyed by her authority. Her career illustrated how ordinary origins, personal grievance, and opportunism could merge with ideology to produce extraordinary cruelty. Within the Nazi camp system, Mandl exercised power without restraint, combining personal violence with bureaucratic efficiency. Her execution marked not only the end of an individual life, but a postwar reckoning with a system that had allowed mass murder to be administered by those who claimed merely to be following duty.
