Video: How a young music lover became a member of the SS and the head of a concentration camp
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
In the late 1930s, many German women entered the concentration camps. Not everyone liked this job, but some became real professionals. So, Maria Mandel became the head of the women's section of Auschwitz. She was very fond of music, but that did not stop her from sending 500,000 people to the gas chambers.
Maria Mandel was born in Austria and after leaving school worked as a postman. When she was 26, she decided to radically change her occupation, joined the SS and got a job in a concentration camp as a warden. The girl's job was to keep order in the barracks of female prisoners. In 1938, such a job paid well, moreover, it was not physically burdensome. Therefore, at that time, many German women willingly went to the auxiliary personnel of the SS.
In Ravensbrück, Maria Mandel proved to be a good performer and was appointed senior camp overseer, and soon she was transferred to the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz. All female prisoners were now under her control. One of the tasks of Maria Mandel was the appointment of punishments, and the woman willingly took advantage of this.
Former prisoners, remembering Auschwitz, call the warden a "monster" and "beast." In addition to daily roll calls and appointments to work, Maria Mandel personally chose whom to send to the gas chambers, made death lists. From 1942 to 1945, while SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Mandel was heading a section of Auschwitz, 500,000 women and children were trapped in the gas chambers and crematorium.
Maria Mandel also had her favorites, who carried out small errands. True, when they bored her, they immediately went to their death. The warden could shoot on the spot any prisoner who simply looked at her “wrong”. And beating and baiting with dogs was the most common thing for Maria Mandel.
At that time, there were already two orchestras in Auschwitz, consisting of male prisoners. On their model, Maria Mandel organized her own, female one. Mandel turned out to be a real music lover. Out of thousands of Jewish women who own instruments, she carefully selected the best and placed them in a separate barrack number 12. The musicians received new white blouses, striped blazers, and many indulgences. The overseer often visited the music bar and asked to play her favorite songs.
The orchestra played in the morning and evening as the prisoners went to work and returned. Replenishment arriving by rail was also greeted with an orchestra. People were even sent to the gas chambers to music. Naturally, the musicians often played for the authorities of the concentration camp and visiting inspectors. For the good performance of her work, Maria Mandel was noted by her superiors and was awarded the Cross "For Military Merit" 2nd degree.
May 1945 Maria Mandel met in the Muldorf concentration camp in Bavaria. She fled to her homeland, to Austria, but was captured by the Americans. In 1948, after the trial of the executioners of Auschwitz, she was hanged. And a little earlier, her former ward Irma Grese, who was called "The blond devil from Auschwitz." This young beauty, who tortured thousands of people in a concentration camp, has become a symbol of sophisticated cruelty during the years of the Nazi regime.
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