As Head Overseer of the woman’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maria Mandl was the highest-ranked female perpetrator of the Holocaust. In this book, author Eischeid examines how she came to reach this position, and more broadly the role of women in the Nazi killing machine.
The architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust that most people are familiar with are male, but female Nazi party members played a major role in running the concentration camps too. Though the vast majority of them managed to slip back into obscurity by virtue of their sex, the most visible ones like Mandl garnered a perhaps outsized amount of attention for the same reasons.
And Mandl is certainly an interesting case study. This book is the result of literal decades of research and interviews on the part of the author, who spoke to among others friends and neighbors of Mandl, as well as the concentration camp prisoners who suffered under her administration. In painstaking detail she recounts all the ways in which Mandl was complicit, but she presents a nuanced, often conflicting portrait of her without flinching too.
How can one reconcile the side of the personality that led a child she’d made a pet by hand to the gas chamber with the side that loved music and granted special privileges to the members of all-prisoner women’s orchestra; who brutally beat prisoners for the slightest infractions but also spared the lives of at least a couple of them? Consider her staid background and her upbringing in a family which did not approve of her fervent Nazism, and things become even more convoluted.
I wish we got a better understanding of why Mandl flipped so suddenly and earnestly into brutal behavior as soon as she began working at Ravensbrück, but I suppose some things can’t be explained by anyone but her. I did find the pacing of the book a little choppy with many short chapters though, and wished the writing had flowed a bit better.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.