Maria Mandel was sentenced to death by hanging in January 1948. She had developed a method of torture and sadism in various concentration camps that made her one of the most ruthless of the ladies of Nazism.
The great American writer John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1962 and author of extraordinary novels such as “Grapes of Wrath” and “East of Paradise”, maintained, in this last novel to be precise, a disturbing theory. He said that some human beings are born with physical malformations, serious or mild mutilations, visible to the rest of the world, which for better or worse condition their life and that of those around them. But other human beings are born with mental malformations, invisible to the rest of the world, mutilations of the soul, which also condition their lives and the lives of others in general for the worse and not for the better. That is, in some way, part of the plot basis of “East of Paradise.”
When Maria Mandel was hanged in Poland on January 24, 1948, almost three years after the end of World War II, it will soon be seventy-seven years since that execution and it will always be remembered. It is good to remember an act of justice who helps the world live a little better, he also lost the chance to discover, if that discovery was of any use, the magnitude, depth and scope of his mutilated soul. Mandel, who was called “The beast of Auschwitz”, was the Nazi officer of three concentration camps, Ravensbrück, the death factory that was Auschwitz and Mühldorf, a branch of the Dachau concentration camp, where she arrived when the war was already lost for Germany, and when The Nazis tried to erase the dimension of the genocide which they had carried out in the name of a superior race.
Mandel is held responsible for sending people to their deaths to more than five hundred thousand people, if he had been in charge, he would only have moved a finger to the right or to the left, of sending to the gas chambers of Auschwitz or destining them for forced labor, the thousands of people who arrived daily, most of them Jews deported from the European territories occupied by the Nazis. He also participated in horrific tortures, of incredible medical experiments that cost the lives of prisoners who were forcibly subjected to unspeakable human trials. The testimonies denounced that she was also excited by suffering and, above all, when she herself was the one who applied the torments. She was held responsible for having sent pregnant women to the gas chambers when they arrived at Auschwitz and spent just minutes between the much feared “Die Rampen”, which operated at the end of the platforms, until their immediate elimination in the gas chambers. Mandel was seen drowning newborns in buckets of water, subjecting children and adults to slavery until he grew tired of them and ordered their elimination. And all this, and more, was done by Mandel with the calm and perhaps the joviality with which brutal perversion unfolds when protected by impunity.
This piece of human scum, however, was once a beautiful and talkative girl. Perhaps with her mutilated soul, she could have been something else. It would have been strange, but it could have been. If she was not born with a mutilated soul, it is impossible and somewhat frustrating to try to discover when and why a human being who becomes a torturer who is excited by the sight of lacerated flesh, a merciless murderer who displays a chilling cold-bloodedness, an emperor of evil in a kingdom of horror such as a prison camp, a human being who never, while his enormous power lasted, showed a gesture of distress, of sorrow, of regretIt is also true that delving into such a personality is fatuous and useless.
Mandel was born on 10 January 1912 in the Austrian town of Münzkirchen, in Upper Austria and not far from the German border. She was the youngest of four siblings, the three eldest being boys, born to a marriage of craftsmen: the father was a shoemaker and the mother ran a small blacksmith business. Being the only female among four siblings, she became the first to be born in XNUMX. a spoiled and pampered girl, with few whims, all satisfied, and a certain personal charm. Popular at school, with a good command of the language, educated in the Catholic religion, she always accompanied her family to school. Sunday Mass.
When she finished her secondary education, she went to what in Germany was called “Bürgerschule”, training centres for young people who wanted to dedicate themselves to commerce or crafts. Beauty, sympathy, and loquacity, which would be useful to her in Nazism when she had already become “The Beast of Auschwitz”, also helped her to get through those difficult years of transition between adolescence and youth. At seventeen, something had already broken in her person: she faced up to Terrible harshness towards his mother (the reasons were never revealed) and she was expelled from her home, to which she never returned. She then began to wander through the German working world, in those terrible years that marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the advent of Nazism. Her father sheltered her for a time in the family business, but Mandel went from failure to failure: cook in Switzerland, employee in a market, clerk in a warehouse, nothing. With Nazism already on the rise, she was employed by the post office, from which she was fired for not sympathizing enough, or for not expressing her sympathies, with the National Socialist ideas. Mandel was to take charge from that day of being a faithful and dedicated Nazi.
She was already a woman when, at the age of twenty-six, she met her ill fate. In 1938, when war was imminent and Adolf Hitler was rehearsing his role as king of Europe, Mandel entered, on the recommendation of a relative, the Lichtenburg prison in Saxony, which was both a prison and a training institute for prison guards. Mandel It was the best average among fifty women, considered by his teachers and the focus of attention of the Nazi leaders who began to look for prison guards for the concentration camps that already existed in Germany, and which would later multiply in Eastern Europe.
In 1939, after the outbreak of war with the German invasion of Poland, Mandel ended up in the Ravensbrück camp, ninety kilometers from Berlin, which was initially intended only for women. It was not until 1941 that it would house the barracks for male prisoners. It was at Ravensbrück, the German word for Crow's Bridge, that Mandel exhibited his brutality and his sadism. The camp forced female prisoners to work in the German arms industry, but the number of women arriving each day was so large that the elimination of many of them in the still incipient gas chambers was also a daily routine.
Medical and gynecological experiments were carried out there without any hygiene and, in many cases, without erudition, understanding or foresight, much less common sense, in the application of medical principles. The Nazis caused hundreds of abortions, They tested injections to eliminate menstruation, they caused wounds that were sutured raw and without anesthesia to equalize the conditions of a combat, among other frightening practices supposedly scientific. Calculations say that fifty thousand women died in these experiments and about three thousand were killed in the gas chambers.
It was at Ravensbrück that Mandel stood out. She surprised her superiors with her coldness and her techniques of punishing prisoners. She did not tolerate being looked into the eyes: whoever did so was sent to death. Mandel made a sadistic game of it. She would stand for hours in front of a prisoner who was condemned not to look at her; she would also order the murder of any newcomer who met her eyes on the railway yard where Mandel decided who lived and who was sent to the gas chambers.
He had managed to set up a bunker of his own in the camp where those who committed the slightest infraction were sent. There they were punished in person by Mandel, who wielded a whip and forced the unfortunate women to count one by one the lashes that, depending on the infraction, were divided into twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five or one hundred strokes. No one could count more than the first ten until they fell exhausted and shattered. In many cases, the prisoners were abandoned there, bleeding and half naked, in temperatures that exceeded thirty degrees below zero. None survivedWitnesses to the madness claimed that Mandel wore snow-white gloves at the beginning of the day, which by evening were stained with the prisoners' blood and attested to the care taken by the head of all the guards.
One of those witnesses was Neus Catalá, a Spaniard born in Tarragona in 1915, who had been a member of the Unified Socialist Youth of Catalonia during the Civil War, and was one of the few survivors of Ravensbrück. She died in April 2019, aged 103, after decades of witnessing the horrors of the Nazis. She told of Ravensbrück: “Many days we stayed there until nine in the morning, from four in the morning. Without having drunk anything but water that wasn’t even hot. A water they called coffee, a bitter thing that must have been dried nettles, I don’t know. And nothing else. With that on our bodies, dressed in that way where nothing kept us warm… Every day women fell, every day women fell dead. Every day. One day it was down to thirty degrees below zero.”
Mandel quickly rose through the ranks of the Nazi ranks. The prisoners feared her, and perhaps even her superiors, who valued her cruelty and her lack of mercy. She was in charge of other women, guards like her, such as Irma Grese, to whom Mandel felt an unconcealed attraction, Dorothea Binz or Juana Bormann. On July 7, 1942, with a new rank in the SS, that of Oberausfsherin, supervisor, she was sent to this great industrial complex of death that was Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was immediately promoted to Lagerführerin, or camp commander, a position just below the camp commander, the feared Rudolf Hoss. She took Grese with her, whom she promoted to head of the Auschwitz camp for Hungarian Jews.
It was there that he earned the nickname “The Beast.” His power over the prisoners and his subordinates was absolute. He had total control over the lives of the inmates because his position gave him “license to kill”, which he had previously exercised with equal zeal. After his trial in Krakow in 1947, it was discovered that he had signed or endorsed at least five hundred thousand death orders for Jewish prisoners. The calculation does not include the murders that Mandel committed for pleasure, for sadism. In the winter of 1942-1943, for example, Mandel conducted an inspection of a female prisoner's ward at five o'clock on a Sunday morning in temperatures of minus twenty degrees. The inspection was slow and laborious, and was prolonged by an unexpected disinfection. Nearly a thousand women froze to death and many others were shot dead, at random, at Mandel's brutal whim.
Her madness led her into brutal contradictions. She loved music, she was able to be moved by the notes written by the genius of Giacomo Puccini, although she was incapable of feeling anything for the prisoners whom she murdered or sent to their death. Her visceral hatred of the Jews, however, caused one prisoner, Alma Rosé, to avoid the gas chamber. Rosé was the niece of the composer Gustav Mahler and a famous violinist. Mandel made Rosé form a women's orchestra, as she called it, the “First Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz”, which filled the selection of prisoners destined for the gas chambers with classical music, the arrival of the unfortunate ones at Auschwitz, the deadly roll calls and inspections, and, in addition, the torture sessions. Rosé died in Auschwitz of typhus on 4 April 1944, at the age of thirty-seven.
Mandel also participated in Josef Mengele's gruesome medical experiments at Auschwitz. One of them was designed to investigate the effects of sulfonamide, which would be of vital importance in first aid for those wounded in combat. Men and women were injected with bacteria or neurotoxins such as those that cause gas gangrene or tetanus. The circulation of these human guinea pigs was interrupted by blocking the blood vessels at both ends of the wound, to create a condition similar to that of a wound on the battlefield. The infection was aggravated by the introduction of wood and glass shavings and then treated with sulfonamide and other drugs to determine their effectiveness. Very few survived the experiment, and other trials, in which Mandel participated willingly: he said he enjoyed a certain sexual excitement, next to Mengele, probably his occasional lover.
In that world of horror of Nazism, Mandel was perhaps the most powerful woman in Nazi Germany. There is no known instance of compassion from her. On the contrary, she followed in the footsteps of the head of the SS and head of the concentration camps of the Third Reich, Heinrich Himmler: “Even the child in the cradle must be trampled underfoot like a poisonous toad,” Himmler had said, and Mandel was in charge of murdering newborns in Auschwitz by drowning them in buckets of water. In a short period of time, of compunction, saved a four-year-old gypsy boy whom he cared for, according to witnesses, as if he were his own son. But it all didn't last long, after a short period of time he ordered his assassination. Mandel called the prisoners “My Jewish Pets”He would enslave them to serve him personally, then he would quickly get fed up and have them murdered or sent to the gas chambers.
In November 1944, with the war lost, with the Russians deployed towards Berlin on the Eastern Front and the Allies also heading towards Berlin on the Western Front, six months after the defeat and Hitler's suicide, The Nazis tried to erase the evidence of their crimes, dismantle the camps and block out the sun with her hand. That month, Mandel was transferred from Auschwitz, which would be liberated by the Russians in January, to Dachau. There, far from appeasing her criminal instinct, she continued to lead the torture sessions and the selection of prisoners destined to die. It was not until May 1945, with Germany already defeated and the arrival of the Allies imminent, that she was finally released. Mandel left Dachau and fled through the mountains of southern Bavaria towards his hometown.
She was arrested in Austria by the Americans on 10 August 1945. After two years in Allied hands, she was extradited to Poland. In November 1947 she was tried for her crimes in Krakow, a city near Auschwitz. He never took responsibility for his guilt. She did what almost everyone does: she placed all responsibility on the camp commander, Rudolf Hoss, who could not explain much: he himself had been executed in April of that year, on a gallows erected near the Auschwitz crematoria. On December 22, 1947, Maria Mendel, the Beast of Auschwitz, She was sentenced to death by hanging for the direct or indirect death of half a million people.
A strange story cast some pity on her merciless figure. On the morning of her sentencing, Mandel and her henchwoman, Therese Brandl, came across a Polish woman, Stanislawa Rachwalowa, in the prison showers. She had been in Auschwitz, had been tortured and abused by Mandel herself, and now she met her again, naked and wet, in the showers of a prison in Krakow. Rachwalowa had escaped death in Auschwitz, but she had not escaped Stalin: Released from the Nazis, she was imprisoned again for her anti-communist activism. She was not released until 1956.
The long-suffering Polish prisoner recounted that Mandel approached her, his former prisoner, with tears in his eyes and said in slow, clear German: “Please forgive me.” Stanislawa said she had put aside all anger and resentment and also in clear, slow German replied: “I forgive you on behalf of all the prisoners.” Mandel knelt down and kissed her hands. As he left, and before parting forever, Mandel turned his head and said in perfect Polish: “Dzinkuje, thank you.” They never saw each other again.
If the story is true, it shows a sensitivity never before revealed in Mandel's life. Perhaps the imminence of death awakens hidden concerns in those with a mutilated soul.
Maria Mandel was hanged on January 24, 1948.Fifteen minutes after the trapdoor opened beneath her feet, she was examined and declared dead. Her body was sent to the Medical School of the University of Krakow. There, students examined the remains of a blonde woman, thirty-six years old, one metre and sixty-five metres tall and weighing sixty kilos.
There were no marks on his body, except for the rope that had been left around his neck.