Mistress of Life and Death is written by Susan J. Eischeid. This book looks at Maria Mandl, who was the Head Overseer of the Women's Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The author had done careful research to give readers a big picture to who Mandl was.

She born 1912 in Austria, rose to be one of the highest-ranking women in the Nazi concentration camp system. She played an important part in the selection, mistreatment, and murder of prisoners. What I enjoyed the most was learning where she came from and how she got to this part of history.

She was born and raised in a Catholic Family. She had to leave her hometown to seek employment elsewhere. She ended up at Lichtenburg, then Ravensbrück. She was responsible for training female guards.

While she was harsh with some she was personally involved with others. Especially the children. She created a women’s orchestra at Aushwitz.

This was an interesting read. I learned a lot through it. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for allowing me to read a copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.

This book really stays with you. How does someone become a psychopath? It was amazing to see her transformation from a young woman to a monster. It boggles my mind that people could commit such horrible acts on their fellow men. I'm glad that people were held responsible for their actions, but it doesn't make up for the atrocities committed.

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.

What drives a middle class young woman to become a psychopath? We many never know the root cause but Maria Mandl of Austria became one as described in her biography. World War II gave this young woman an opportunity to better herself with a job with the Nazi's . She rose up the ladder to head overseer of the largest women's prisoner of war camps.
The author, Susan Eischeid thoroughly documents Maria's life through interviews of actual prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other women's German WWII prison camps and people she worked with there. We learn what it was like after the war when she among others were arrested and her time spent in jail.
I was interested in this book to learn of the war from the perspective of a prison guard. It is hard to read how Maria and other guards could inflict this type of pain on other human beings. (And some guards did not). Her choices impacted her family in a very hard way. What drove her to do this? It seemed like she had two personalities. I found it fascinating to read of her trial and her sentence. It really gave me an insight into this aspect of the war. Thank you Susan Eischeid for a well documented read on Maria Mandl.

I really enjoyed this book. Learning what it takes for a human to turn from normal young woman to monster sue to societal pressures was enlightening. What the SS perpetrated on the people of Europe was completely inhuman and revolting. The things that human beings will do to each other is utterly disappointing. I'm just grateful that people were eventually held responsible for their actions and the actions of their subordinates.

A thoroughly researched and well-written biography of one of the most notorious figures of the holocaust.

Mistress of Life and Death gives insight into the life of Maria Mandl, from the innocence of childhood, to her time working in concentration camps, to her inevitable arrest, trial, and execution. It shows her descent into a monster who commited horrific acts, and the mask that she showed the outside world.

A really interesting read.

In this brutal biography of one of the Ravensbruck guards, SS Overseer Maria Mandl, Susan J. Eischeid exposes the rise and fall of an individual who actively participated in the brutal treatment of prisoners at the Ravensbruck women’s camp and followed Nazi ideology. At the same time, however, Eischeid presents a more human perspective of Mandl, a musician with loving parents and a sister, which forces readers to confront this other side of an SS concentration camp overseer. An uncomfortable contrast, it provides readers with the opportunity to learn more about individuals like Mandl who occupied such positions under the Nazis. Eischeid does not shy away from the many brutalities of the Nazi regime or life at Ravensbruck, but seeing such events from the perspectives of the prisoners (supplemented by quotes from camp survivors interviewed by Eischeid) and the overseer adds a new level of nuance and complexity to this already complex and emotionally difficult biography. Eischeid uses short chapters through the book for the sake of comprehension, which makes the book less dense for readers; her prose and use of primary sources, documents, and quotes add such incredible detail to this biography and the narrative of the complicated life of Maria Mandl.

Mistress of Life and Death covers parts of history that never is told about. World War II era fans will definitely want to read it. Five stars.

This is a really interesting book! It's very informative and I think the subject matter is handled well. The chapters are very short which I liked. I would recommend this to those who enjoy history. Special Thank You to Susan
J. Eischeid, Kensington Books and NetGalley for allowing me to read a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

I struggled for a long time on how to rate this book, and had to sit with it for a while before I felt I could put my thoughts into words.

This book's purpose is to trace the evolution of a woman from an ordinary and generally well-thought of person to a mass murderer- the banality, or ordinariness, of evil . Maria Mandl was one of the most notorious female guards in the Nazi concentration camp system, and oversaw the women's camp at Birkenau during it's most active period. She was later executed for her crimes- one of the few women executed for war crimes after the Holocaust. And while the author was quite clear about the purpose of this book, I don't feel that it was fully met. In terms of literature relating to Holocaust perpetrators Eischeid has clearly done her reading, citing such landmark works as Browning's Ordinary Men. But while those books truly showed the progression of "ordinary" to evil, I didn't think this one captured that as well. After thinking on it for a while, I ended up settling on this for two reasons.

The first was the pacing. The book is a chronological telling of Mandl's life, tracing her from birth to death. But the pacing was off. There was comparatively little of Mandl's first experience as a prison guard, which would have better demonstrated the mental and ethical scrambling that was so well done in Browning's book. Perhaps there were few records for the author to draw from (the Nazis were notorious for their love of records, and their attempts to destroy them when they knew they were losing the war). But the jump from "ordinary" civilian to guard at Ravensbruck was too abrupt to truly demonstrate the downward slide. Likewise, the large amount of book given to Mandl's time in prison after the Holocaust and leading up to her trial and execution, full of other prisoners talking about how much of a model prisoner she was, left the book ending on a strange note.

The second were the sources used. I want to say that I am sure that this was not the author's intention- but the book came off a bit too sympathetic at times. I think that is down to the sources quoted. Mandl's own testimony is, of course, an important source, but was perhaps quoted too frequently. Likewise testimony from her fellow prisoners from her imprisonment after the war- too sympathetic to her. Again, I want to stress that I absolutely do not believe that this was the author's intention. I think it was simply a combination of the time spent talking about Mandl after the war and the number of sources used to point out how kind, good, or ordinary she was- especially from sources that may confuse readers who may not be as knowledgeable about the post-war trials of Nazis (and the miscarriage of justice that allowed many Nazis to go free or with light sentences).

Overall, I think this book is a good exploration of a female perpetrator of the Holocaust, as there aren't nearly as many books examining female perpetrators of the Holocaust as compared to their male perpetrators, but should be read with a critical mind and after having done some previous reading on the topic. I would highly recommend Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men as necessary reading before this book.

Becoming part of the Nazi machine during WWII is no excuse for the brutality of Maria Mandel and her "work" in Auschwitz/Birkenau. The author has obviously done a lot of research into the life of this monster and does present a full picture of her life. Difficult to read, not sure I would recommend it.

I received this book in exchange for a honest review from NetGalley.

This was easily one of the hardest books that I read this year. As someone with family members who were in concentration camps and lived through occupied Holland, reading about the life and atrocities of Maria Mandl was incredibly difficult. I understand that all humans have the capacity for monstrous actions and this book hammers that point home even more. It is a very stark book that outlines her life and actions in excruciating detail, asking the reader not to decide on her guilt (for that is bleakly obvious from the facts) but whether she was capable of understanding her own guilt and repenting. It may make me evil or unkind but I am the type who believes actions and not words or far too late apologies are what makes a person. You can not undo years of brutalization through repentance in my opinion so whether she repented or understood her own role doesn't matter. On the topic of the books quality, the disjointed style of writing and the exceptional number of chapters was annoying but the writing itself and the research were exceptional.

To be honest, I approached Susan J. Eischeid’s upcoming book Mistress of Life and Death: The Dark Journey of Maria Mandl, Head Overseer of the Women’s Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau with a chip on my shoulder.

I have an issue with the ways in which publishers and other media outlets (I’m looking at you, History Channel) try to capitalize on the human suffering of the holocaust by making Nazis the subjects of books, films, and documentaries. Most of these are written from the perspective that there is something fascinating about the phenomenon of Naziism: that learning about Nazis can help humanity better understand the nature of human evil and perhaps even “solve” it somehow.

This is the angle that Eischeid takes in her biography of Maria Mendl, a Nazi who oversaw female prisoners at multiple death camps, primarily Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrük. Over 112 chapters (yes, you read that correctly – 112 chapters), the author narrates Mendl’s life from birth to her execution for crimes against humanity in 1948. Eischeid argues: “Ultimately, Maria’s life journey encompasses the eternal questions of right versus wrong, good versus evil, and the paradox of how cruelty and compassion can exist in the same person.” Like many books within this genre, the narrative is driven by the quest to determine when, how, and why, Mendl transformed from a nice farm girl to a homicidal monster. Eischeid points to psychological triggers, like getting dumped by her fiancé and not having kids of her own, alongside chance events (she needed a job and was able to get one as a prison guard through a relative), and the simple fact that she loved the power that came with the Nazi uniform.

Readers hoping for an “aha!” moment that unlocks the secrets of good and evil will be disappointed. In the end, Mandl is represented as a regular person who was put in an extreme circumstance and learned that she loved the power that came with it: a tale as old as time itself. (The fact that she was indoctrinated to hate Jews is never explicitly mentioned, but feels relevant to add).

For me the real problem stems from two questions that Eischeid asks her readers at the beginning of the book: “Is it wrong to try and understand [Mendl’s] actions from some previously assumed mantle of empathy? And how does one tell Maria’s story with compassion without neglecting the very real suffering of the victims?”

Pardon?

Is it wrong to tell the story of a war criminal’s war crimes from a place of empathy? How can a war criminal’s story be told with compassion? While respecting the suffering of…her victims?

I have a few questions of my own for Eischeid and her editorial team. Why does Mandl deserve for her story to be treated with compassion? Why does it need to be told at all?

As the author makes clear, Mandl was responsible for thousands of murders, beatings, and other atrocities – many of which she carried out with her own hands. What about these actions, I’d be curious to know, makes Eischeid think that Mandl’s story needs to be told with compassion? Or with empathy?

It’s problem much bigger than this book. Narrating the lives of Nazis and other war criminals in a way that encourages “empathy” and “compassion” opens the floodgates to empathy with their causes. As I’ve written elsewhere, data shows how books that encourage understanding with Nazi characters contribute to Holocaust misinformation, much like the clusterfuck that is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. In a world where Jews are already so hated – and, to be clear, I’m talking about our own moment, not Nazi-era Europe – any narrative that encourages readers to empathize with Nazis can have dangerous real-world consequences.

The other major issue I have with Eischeid’s book is the way it erases Jews and Jewish suffering from the Holocaust. In the book’s 112 chapters (the print edition runs over 500 pages), the term “Jew” only shows up 34 times. On the other hand, “Jehovah” comes up ten times and “political prisoner” nineteen times; Jehovah’s Witnesses and political prisoners are discussed almost as frequently as Jews and there is no real discussion of the racial, anti-Jewish element of the Holocaust. For instance, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political prisoners were among the first populations of inmates over whom Mendl had power, but as the book progresses, most of the Jewish prisoners are described, not as Jews, but by their nationalities, such as “Polish,” “Greek,” or “German.” It takes a fairly in-depth knowledge of Holocaust history to know that the incoming “Greeks” and “Hungarians” the author references are waves of Jews from those countries. Their fate (immediate gassing) is not mentioned, nor is there any sense of the scale of Jewish life taken during the holocaust.

I’d even go so far to say that there are ways in which the book further dehumanizes Mandl’s victims. For instance, Mandl oversaw horrific medical experiments during her reign at Ravensbrük on “Lab Rabbits,” as Eischeid calls the victims, who – to be clear – were not rabbits but actual humans (Jewish ones, in fact, but readers won’t learn that from the book). It’s unclear where the term came from – if it’s what the Nazis called them or a term the author made up – but no matter the source, there is something so demeaning in the way the author continually refers to these human victims like this. At the very least, it seems wildly disrespectful to repeatedly use this term to describe actual people who were submitted to horrible medical experiments.

For a book that is so eager to force a sense of Mandl’s humanity onto readers, there doesn’t seem to be much of an effort to underline the humanity of her victims, especially the Jewish ones.

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan J. Eischeid is an excruciatingly heart-crushing book about pure evil in the shape of Maria Mandl, the SS Head Overseer of the women at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eischeid did meticulous research including talking with family and acquaintances of Holocaust survivors over a span of nineteen years. The result is in-depth information about Maria's childhood in a middle-class household, her aspirations, job history, applying for a job at a new camp overseeing "prostitutes" while earning an excellent salary, her hunger for attention and power resulting in barbaric treatment of female and child prisoners, chimney selections, social life outside of camp, her trial at Nuremberg, imprisonment and hanging.

I have read countless books on the Holocaust and always, always find information nearly impossible to process in its hideous cruelty. This all-sensory book does not gloss over terrible and graphic details and is so descriptive I wept at the despair of the innocents. The most burning question is, of course, how a girl raised in a relatively normal home could possibly morph into The Beast years later. During the Nuremberg trials a few women extolled her caring attitude, yet she personally beat and killed thousands for sport and to wield power and control. She could humiliate, torture and kill during the day and host parties at her luxurious house on the weekend. She was privy to Himmler and Dr. Mengele's methods, too.

That some survived this hell is miraculous. Prisoners started at death every moment of every day and endured unspeakable dignities as a matter of course. What human beings are capable of (killing machines, innocent prisoners) is astonishing. This book is as dark and disturbing as it gets because these are real events. Real people. I could only read bits at a time every few days but am very glad I did. It gave me a better understanding about how such wicked transformations can happen, the desperation for recognition and power, though understanding the person and actions is inconceivable.

I highly, highly recommend reading this book if you feel the need to know more about this despicable time in history. It will definitely challenge and shake you. Do prepared for cold, raw reality. But the reward is great.

My sincere thank you to Kensington Books and NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of this powerful book. Though Holocaust stories are gut wrenching and difficult to read, they are extremely important. This one has left an indelible mark on my mind. I appreciate the work and agony which went into writing Mistress of Life and Death.

This book was extremely well written and researched! It was very readable and in a very logical order! I would definitely recommend it to any history or WW2 lover. As can be expected with a Holocaust book, there were many dark and disturbingly graphic things in this book, but it is about the Holocaust. I would've dearly loved to reach into the book and given Maria Mandl a sharp slap. I hated her, but the book itself about her was very well done.

A biography of a woman who completely changed character after entering the concentration camps as an ‘employee’. The author has a clear interest in the subject and had completed research which enabled her to tell Maria Mandl’s story with accuracy and intrigue. A stark reminder of the horrors of that time and why society can never let it happen again.

Thank you NetGalley, Susan J. Eischeid, and Kensington Books for allowing me to read an advanced copy of Mistress of Life and Death. I received an advanced reader copy for free and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Non-fiction books are often tricky to pull off well. A lot of times they can read as though they are being narrated by the most monotone speaking history teacher giving a boring lecture. This, however, was not the case. Eischeid did a fantastic job constructing the timeline of Maria Mandl's life. It had an even flow from beginning to end. Nothing felt repetitive at all. It was evident Eischeid had a great interest in the subject matter.

Maria Mandl's journey was one that took a tragic turn. She came from a good family with strong religious values. After entering into her profession in the concentration camps, her personality changed from being a decent human to a horrible monster. The amount of torture she was solely responsible for, was absolutely heartbreaking to read.

This biography is very detailed, gives us an in-depth insight into the upbringing and working life of Maria Mandl. I've read books/excerpts of books regarding Mandl before but this has been by far the most detailed attempt at understanding her motivations for her actions and what she was really like as a person. However, I still thought that at some parts this was lacking. For example, at times it jumped a bit too quickly between accounts of people who knew her saying that she was a classy, professional, caring woman who never abused or mistreated anybody in the camp, people who believed she was completely evil and claim she hit/tortured women at every opportunity, and gained satisfaction from this because she was a sadist, and those who give a mixed account, indicating that she would abuse/mistreat prisoners but that she wasn't really evil/a sadist but that she did it solely to impress the higher-ups and didn't enjoy it at all. They surely can't all be true, and although the author never claims to KNOW for certain Mandl's motivations and instead is attempting to paint a picture of the contrast between how Mandl was perceived amongst different groups of people, I still found it a bit jarring to jump from reading about how kind she could be and how unremarkable/pleasant her childhood was right to how abusive/malicious she could apparently act in her roles in the concentration camps. It left me feeling like I didn't really know or understand Mandl much better than I did before reading it, and made me wish there were interviews/ways of hearing Mandl's thoughts directly other than her trial transcripts and letters. However, this book was the best attempt I've come across at trying to understand Mandl.

The only real issue I had with the book is that there weren't many new photographs as claimed by the book's description, and imagery in general was sparse throughout the book. There were a few pictures I had seen before from other sources. I am hoping this is to do with this only being a provisional version of the biography, perhaps because of copyright laws etc, but if not, I believe the book's description would be misleading in this regard. I would have liked to see more images depicting Mandl's family life and personal life to help us better understand and immerse ourselves into the account.

Overall, very interesting and in-depth book. Would recommend reading if you have an interest in history, particularly the Holocaust and female concentration camp guards.

Mistress of Life and Death is a standard biography of a unknown figure in the history of the Holocaust but also looking at women and their effect on the holocaust and their role in the atrocities.

This is an impressively researched but gosh so dark portrait of a woman who was a demon What made Maria Mandi? Eischeid does her best to explore Mandi's life and motivation. I found her repellant and ultimately opted not to finish. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.