Bad conscience? Regret? Maria Mandl did not remotely experience either of those. "There was nothing bad about the camp," said the senior overseer of the all-women's concentration camp in Ravensbrück, Germany. The 36-year-old was hung in 1948 after a Krakow court sentenced her to death as a war criminal.
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Her career of cruelty is part of the new exhibition about female concentration camp guards at the memorial site. Over 140,000 people, mainly women and children, from over 30 countries were imprisoned in Ravensbrück, 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Berlin, between 1939 and 1945. The camp was also the main training and recruiting place for female guards. Some 3,300 of them worked in Ravensbrück.
The Austrian Maria Mandl was exactly what the self-proclaimed proponents of the "master race" wanted their female guards to be: loyal and merciless.
Someone like Mandl could go places under the perverse hierarchy of the Nazis. In 1942, after three years in Ravensbrück, she was transferred to work at the death camp Auschwitz. There, she created the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz that was forced to play music during prisoner transports and executions.
In 1940, after World War II had begun, the female guards became subsumed under Hitler's elite death squad the SS (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squadron in English.) The freshly designed and updated exhibition, "In the SS's Service," first conceived in 2004, does not shirk from details. The location of the exhibition was also carefully considered: The old barracks for female camp guards, right next to the former camp. Only a wall and barbed wire separated the perpetrators from their victims.
Audio files of the torment and capricious abuse carried out on the prisoners can also be heard in the exhibition. Some of the interviews with witnesses are more than 20 years old. Ursula Winska from Poland, for example, explains in a video how Maria Mandl beat an older woman especially brutally on a pathway in the camp. When a fellow intimate came to her aid, she in turn ended up in the bunker. For months later, she was hit in the face every day, with the mocking comment: "You are a lady, but I can hit you."
There were some female guards who occasionally showed some humanity. According to another Polish prisoner, Henryka Stanecka, her group of prisoners were permitted to dip in the lake after finishing a muddy day's work in a sugar beet field. "One guard even gave us a towel," Stanecka said.