Mistress of Life and Death: The Dark Journey of Maria Mandl, Head Overseer of the Women's Camp at Auschwitz- Birkenau

“Mistress of Life and Death is a very upsetting account, but a necessary one. As the author writes . . . people who’d otherwise lead blameless lives are capable of great evil under the right circumstances.”

Twenty years in the writing, Susan J. Eischeid’s Mistress of Life and Death is a harrowing account of an ordinary woman’s evolution from a normal middle-class childhood in Austria, with loving parents, into an inhuman beast who takes pleasure in mercilessly beating helpless prisoners, killing babies, and condemning women—many of them pregnant—to the gas chambers.

Our story starts in 1912, in the pleasant village of Munzkirchen on Austria’s northern border with Germany. Life changed for the convent-educated girl, a gifted pianist, at the Anschluss in March of 1938. Germany formally annexed Austria, and the fact that Mandl’s family were not Nazi party members led to two momentous events. Mandl’s ardent Nazi lover abandoned her for political reasons, and she was dismissed from the post office.

Without a husband and few job prospects, Mandl leveraged contacts from her uncle and was hired on as a concentration camp guard at Lichtenburg KZ. She said, “Had I not gotten the job in the KZ, I would have studied to become a nurse.” If she had, thousands of lives might have been spared.

Not notably sadistic before that point, Mandl “descended rapidly into a full-blown state of brutality,” Eischeid writes. “Some severe and inexplicable transition in Maria’s personality had taken place between the breakup with her fiancé and the beginning of her job at Lichtenburg. An abrupt moral breakdown was evident, a disintegration of ethical behavior.”

The book is an unrelenting account of the personal brutality that then poured forth from Mandl, who seemed to smile and enjoy herself only when inflicting pain. At Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück (both in Germany) and later at Auschwitz-Birkenau (in Poland), where she became the decorated chief of the female guards, she kicked and whipped prisoners until they died for the tiniest infraction—or even the suggestion of one. She personally selected prisoners for the gas chambers, and a list of 498 condemned Greek women she signed off on became a key document against her when she was tried in Poland after the war.

Hannah Arendt developed the concept of the “banality of evil” while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann. It fully applies to Mandl, a mediocrity who reveled in the status her position gave her. In a full-dress uniform, accompanied by SS officers, she returned to her hometown to show that she had at last become an important person.

Mandl never admitted her crimes or asked for forgiveness but hid behind the “only following orders” defense—common among Nazis. She testified that she never beat a prisoner, killed anyone, or took part in gas chamber selections, and personally tasted the abundant food given to the prisoners. She was subordinate to her commandant, and “could not give any punishments.”

Eischeid’s specialty as a professor at Valdosta State University is the music of the Holocaust, and in the book she illuminates Mandl’s role in creating an orchestra in the women’s prison at Auschwitz. Under the direction of Alma Rosé, a gifted violinist and a niece of Gustav Mahler, the orchestra entertained visiting and resident Nazis. Dr. Josef Mengele was a regular, and Eichmann was a distinguished guest. Joining the orchestra kept the musicians alive, at least for a while—Rosé herself succumbed to one of the rampant prison diseases.

Mandl could show kindness to the musicians, who enhanced her standing, and she occasionally “adopted” small children for a few days—showering favors on them before sending them to the ovens. Passages like this are hard to read.

Mandl tried to escape, hid in her sister’s home, but was captured and sent to prison in Poland, where she was executed after trial in 1948. She was only 36.

The book is highly readable, organized into short and effective chapters. It is very well researched, with many interviews from survivors or the relatives of survivors, most conducted in the 2002–2006 period. In addition to providing their testimony, Eischeid tells how she found these sometimes-reluctant witnesses and persuaded them to tell their first-hand stories. A bitter irony is that in prison Mandl sometimes came face to face with some of the Polish women she had abused at Auschwitz—now jailed for anti-communist activities.

Mistress of Life and Death is a very upsetting account, but a necessary one. As the author writes (citing Rwanda and other examples), people who’d otherwise lead blameless lives are capable of great evil under the right circumstances.