Mistress of Life and Death

A masterful exploration of one of the Nazi regime's darkest figures—and one of the few female perpetrators of the Holocaust.

By the time of her execution at thirty-six, Maria Mandl had achieved the highest rank possible for a woman in the Third Reich. As Head Overseer of the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, she was personally responsible for the murders of thousands, and for the torture and suffering of countless more.

Susan J. Eischeid explores how Mandl, regarded locally as “a nice girl from a good family,” came to embody the very worst of humanity. Her life mirrors the period in which she lived: turbulent, violent, and suffused with paradoxes. After the war, Maria was arrested for crimes against humanity; following a public trial attended by the international press, she was hanged in 1948.

For two decades, Eischeid has excavated the details of Mandl's life story, drawing on archival testimonies, speaking to dozens of witnesses, and spending time with Mandl's community of friends and neighbours who shared their memories. The result is a chilling and complex exploration of how easily an ordinary citizen chose the path of evil in a climate of hate and fear.

"A chilling account of how an ordinary Austrian woman from a good family became one of the most brutal and sadistic concentration camp guards at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. Brilliantly researched… should be compulsory reading." - Anne Sebba, New York Times bestselling author of Les Parisiennes

"Music, mass murder, Mandl--Eischeid's reckoning with those factors offers page-turning insight about the Holocaust and humanity." --John K. Roth, author of The Failures of Ethics and Sources of Holocaust Insight