Maria Mandl was part of the first group of women to work in Nazi concentration camps. She was known for her ability to use physical violence to keep prisoners in line. She preferred to beat people herself, which is why they started to call her "The Beast." She would look for people that had curled their hair, going against the camp regulations, and would beat then or force them to shave their heads.
Others described her as a "highly intelligent and sophisticated woman, with nuanced tastes in literature, cuisine, and most famously, in music." After beating a prisoner to death during roll call, she played beautiful music.
In 1942, she was ordered to work at Auschwitz where she oversaw all the female inmates. She had the power to choose which prisoners were sent to the gas chambers and which would be subjected to disgusting medical experiments. Through her time at the camp, Mandl sent 500,000 people to their deaths. Prisoners believed that she was violent, purely because she enjoyed it.
Because she had power, she would pick prisoners as "pets" and make them do whatever she wanted. When she was tired of them, she would have them murdered. Because she had mood swings, one never knew when she would "like" them or have them killed.
She was later captured by the American forces after attempting to flee to Bavaria. She was declared a war criminal for the torture and murder she performed on prisoners. On Jan 24, 1948, she was hung to her death.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/maria-mandl
People like Maria Mandl only perpetrated the intense cruelty of the holocaust. While some claimed that their agreement to carry out the Nazi racist ideas were a result of following orders in fear of being killed, many truly believed in the movement. Maria Mandl may have been one of the people that went beyond Nazi ideology—she seems like she might have even had some psychopathic tendencies in her complete disregard of human life. Doing it out of “enjoyment” and not the usual Nazi militant and political necessity shows this. It seems like a lot of Nazis found no trouble in their personal lives, cruelly subjegating people and playing instruments in the other part. The intense propaganda and justification allowed for soldiers to clear their consciences of any guilt for the countless murders and crimes.
ReplyDeleteTo me this is crazy, how she would beat a prisoner to death during roll call and then right after just started playing beautiful music. She seemed like one of the people who were taking their powers to an extreme level. With picking prisoners as her pets and doing whatever she wanted to them, and it was horrific stuff. I think the American Forces did the right thing in capturing her because if they hadn't who knows how many more innocent lives she would've taken or what she would've done to them.
ReplyDelete