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.

The cover shows one of the photographs taken of Maria Mandl when she was taken into police custody. In it she looks to the side but you can she has her hair pulled back in a neat hairstyle which according to the information further inside the book was a fairly on trend, up to date style. Maria's expression is somewhat stern, almost harsh, possibly stoic, you could even say from her face & posture there us some arrogance there too.

I asked myself the following question on more than one occasion both before starting to read this book and during reading it, 'Why would I want to read a book about someone involved in such atrocities?' Well, the simplistic answer is that it's a period of history that I am really interested in learning about as I believe it should never be forgotten or repeated. I was also curious as to what led Maria Mandl to a path of atrocity & evil. It is the question the author says she continually asked herself as she wrote this book. Susan Eischeid says that Maria Mandls life journey encompasses the eternal question of right vs wrong, good vs evil, and the paradox of how cruelty & compassion can exist in the same person.

I'll totally admit I approached the book hating people like Maria Mandl, the Nazis and what they did during the Holocaust. I honestly cannot say I feel any great difference in emotions after finishing the book.

However I tried my best to approach reading this book and learning about Maria's life as fairly and open minded as I could.

At times during the book, I was internally screaming at Maria, her colleagues and the Nazis. One such time was very early on in the book when the book was describing what happened in September 1946 on the prison extradition train containing the female overseers from the prison camps. Outside people shout & scream, banging on the train wanting to get at the women. Maria makes her way to a toilet cubicle and takes some pills a Nazis Officer & Doctor has given her before guards can stop her. She collapses, convulses, and is forced to vomit up the poison. The guards kick her as she lays on the floor and she mutters, "God protect me" I honestly couldn't believe the irony! I mean really? Calling on God to protect her after what she has done? And if she really believes in God, any God, how could she take part & commit the atrocities she has?
The author does a great job though of making you wonder if Maria felt any reluctance or remorse at what she was part of. She does this by first looking at Maria Mandl’s origins, her family. Maria was born in Austria and brought up religious, to be a good catholic girl. People who remember the young Maria who were interviewed by Susan Eischied say she was a pleasant girl/young woman. Maria's family were not part of, nor did they agree with the Nazis party. Maria’s father, Franz had his own business making shoes which kept the family comfortable financially. They had no connections to the Nazis party at all. In fact, at one point Maria is working for the Post Office and is sacked because she is not a member of the Nazis party. It is then her Uncle who was a Police Chief Constable suggested that Maria apply for a job as an overseer. Maria started out at Ravensbruck which ended up becoming a kind of training camp for overseers.

The conditions for the overseers was good, in fact for some it was better than they were used to at home. The women were then trained to become overseers, told what was expected of them and issued with a uniform as well as canes, pistols and whips to use to keep order. The women were given high heeled boots supposedly to enable them to stride through the awful muddy conditions at the various camps but these same high heeled boots were considered “useful” when kicking the prisoners!

Not everyone took to this tough regime, the Head SS Overseer Supervisor was Johanna Langefeld who also came from Lichtenburg like Maria. Johanna was not 100% on board with the ethical consequences of what they were doing, but she was in a minority. When Johanna could no longer meet the brutal expectations of the Nazis Regime Maria Mandl stepped right on into her job and became in charge of the women (as no female could give a male officer any sort of orders) at Auschwitz. It was whilst she was at this camp that Maria earnt the name Mistress Of Life and Death.

The Author has really done her research, from speaking to Nuns at a school, school friends, neighbours to survivors from the prison camps. You really get a sense of Maria’s fairly normal, though religious upbringing. On one hand you could perhaps say she sort of stumbled into her career in the concentration camps, but on the other hand there was always a home for her to go back to if she didn’t want to work in the camps. Maria seemed to enjoy the life she had, always having the latest hairstyle courtesy of the camp hair salon. Though the irony of her perfectly coiffed hair and the fact prisoners had all their hair shaved off upon arrival at the camp are a stark contract. It is said there were parties and though forbidden there were relationships and flings between the male and female officers, resulting in the male officers referring to the females as whores. At Christmas the overseer’s rooms would be decorated for the season, another irony, it was the prisoners that were put to work doing the decorations! Maria visited her home town all dressed up in her uniform, kind of showing off what she had become, proud of herself. Not all of her family were proud of what she became, her mother was said to be ashamed and prayed daily for her daughter when she realised the type of work she was doing and the fact she eventually became part of the Nazis party.

At her trial Maria Mandl tried many lines of defence from “she was only following orders” she was doing nothing wrong and even flat out denying some of the brutal acts she was known to have committed. Even when faced with survivors who recognised her and recounted the brutality they witnessed and was subjected to by her, she still denied it. Maybe she thought if she didn’t admit it, she somehow hadn’t done it or that she would get away with it.

I found this to be a very interesting, detailed book about a dark time in history. Though my opinion of Maria Mandl and her fellow overseers such as Irma Grese who is perhaps more well known has not really changed. You tend to think of women being more empathetic and caring to others but these women were as barbaric as their male counterparts. There are so many ironies within the book, such as the fact that Maria could be listening to music with her tears in her eyes one minute and then beating someone or sending them to the gas chambers the next minute. The fact Maria would have paperwork changed so prisoners appeared less Jewish as she wanted them orchestra and such a position was considered a high, privileged one. One that a Jew could never be allowed to obtain. A position in the Orchestra meant less hard work, better conditions, “treats” such as walks in the fresh air, being allowed to swim in a nearby lake one time, and extra food. All these “treats” could mean the difference between survival or death. The women of the orchestra were given a uniform, the women allowed to grow their hair as Maria wanted the women to look pretty. She wanted to and often did show off the orchestra to visitors at Auschwitz, taking credit for how good it was. When one of the major members of the orchestra died it is said that Maria Mandl herself was visibly upset. It is also said in the book that Maria Mandl liked children, as did some of the other female overseers and would take a child and almost keep it like a “pet” until they tired of the child and then it would be sent to the gas chambers.

I did “enjoy” learning more about how Maria came to become an overseer and the “training” she underwent. All the information is presented so well by the author. Susan never condemns, she reports the facts for you to form your own opinion and make your own decisions. The author makes you wonder what sort of life Maria and the other overseers would have had if not for Hitler and the Nazi regime. Would she have stayed in her village, married and maybe had a family. Did she have to become an overseer, there were other jobs, maybe she could have returned home to her family and found work locally. But all that is “if only” and there were so many other female overseers and SS Officers would just one less have made any difference, there would have been someone else in her position making the lives of the concentration camp prisoners lives a living hell. Maria Mandl even tried at her trial to say she “helped” the women, which on occasion I suppose in her warped mind she perhaps did. I keep coming back to my thoughts of the fact she had to know what she was doing was wrong surely? I know at one point, maybe more she did try to leave/change her overseer job but was told in no uncertain terms she was staying where she was and to get on with it.

In the end, Maria is sentenced to death which some would say was a relatively easy, painless way out for her and her colleagues when compared to what those in the concentration camps went through on a daily basis. No punishment could make right or undo the horrors that happened, and feeding/clothing Maria Mandl in a prison would still be an easy life in comparison to those in the concentration camps. I did learn new facts about Auschwitz within this book as well as discovering details about different camps. I was surprised at how many of the female overseer’s names were familiar to me, yet had I been asked to name any, the only one I would have probably come up with would have been Irma Grese. The fact all these females went through the same training at Ravensbruck only compounds the disgust and horror that there were, so many other like Maria Mandl, perhaps some not as harsh as her but also there would be ones that were even more cruel than her. We tend to hear a lot about the different men and SS Officers involved in the Holocaust but not so much about the women. Certain things reminded me of when I read The Dressmakers Of Auschwitz by Lucy Adlington, in fact the author Susan does reference this book. I still don’t understand how anyone, male or female could treat other human beings like this, but the fact remains they did and it should never be forgotten. Unfortunately, the sad, devastating reality is this type of eradication of races is still occurring in our supposedly more modern world. I don’t pretend to understand all the politics of it all but it has to somehow stop.

I feel like I could talk forever about the content of this book but summing up the book is about an historic person and is both interesting and enlightening about a time/era that should never be forgotten. The book is based on facts from interviews the Author herself conducted and covers highly emotional events in an unbiased way.
I still feel the mixed emotions of horror, sadness and disgust that even at trial Maria Mandl and others used the defence of following orders when survivors clearly remembered seeing her commit atrocities, in fact some of them were her personal victims. I don’t know how she could look at them and just deny any wrong doing. I honestly find it extremely difficult to feel any compassion or understanding or forgiveness for this woman, or any of the other brutes who beat, maimed, experimented on and murdered in the name of Hitler & Nazism.

I hate giving bad reviews. Authors put a tremendous amount of time and energy into creating a book and their efforts should be respected as much as possible. I have never written a book and I am just a blogger online yelling into the void. However, I need to be honest. I tried everything I could to find the good in Susan Eischeid's Mistress of Life and Death. I found almost nothing.

The book is about an exceedingly evil woman named Maria Mandl who oversaw the women in concentration camps in World War II. She is not interesting.

The problems with this book are substantial. From a technical perspective, this book is listed as being 400 pages long. There are 112 chapters. That is not a typo. 112 chapters. There is no way to create a cohesive narrative when there is a new chapter every 3-4 pages and in some cases only 1 or 2 pages. This choice might be because Eischeid's writing style is especially choppy. Very often an entire paragraph is a statement of facts without any flourish and then moves on to a different thought. There is no narrative drive. A book on the Holocaust should leave a reader with a sick feeling in their stomach. Before you can even to begin to process a terrible episode in this book, it's on to another chapter and another topic.

There are even more serious issues from a content perspective. Eischeid does not satisfyingly answer her own questions at the beginning of the book. In fact, it seems quite often that she defaults to explaining Mandl's villainy by referencing a broken engagement. We aren't even sure who the man was but somehow this incident is leaned on multiple times in explaining her evil side. Eischeid will sometimes reference experts to explain Mandl. However, it is unclear at times if these experts are just being quoted in general or specifically about Mandl. Also, trying to diagnose and explain someone years after their death and where significant evidence from their life is missing does not hold up to scrutiny. It's guessing.

Eischeid does use the voices of actual Holocaust survivors but they are haphazardly included. A more serious problem is how often Eischeid attributes things in the narrative to "some people said" or "people believed that." Not only does this seem suspect in a non-fiction book, but why do these voices not get the same treatment as people who are quoted by name? There may very well be notes explaining where the information comes from, but if it's from a Holocaust survivor then they deserve their name to be in this book while Mandl's should be erased from history.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Kensington Books.)

Maria Mandl was supposed to be a nice girl from a respectable family whose members weren’t Nazis. As author Eischeid tells it, Maria even lost her good job at the post office after the Anschluss because she wasn’t a member of the Nazi party. That firing led to her ambitious Nazi fiancé breaking their engagement and Maria’s move to Munich, where her uncle suggested she become a guard at a women’s prison. From a small prison, she went on to the purpose-built new women’s prison Ravensbrück, and then to Auschwitz. Almost from the start, Maria was a feared by prisoners, and what’s more, she enjoyed torturing and brutalizing them.

As always, when reading about Nazis, the reader wonders how ordinary people can become so cruel and inhuman. Eischeid thinks that in Maria’s case, being rejected by her fiancé made her determined to succeed, and in the Nazi era that meant getting with the program of racial/ethnic hatred and extermination. It’s easy to see that personal ambition was the fuel for most Nazis, but it’s one thing to mouth the Nazi creed, and another to beat, torture and murder prisoners on a daily basis. Since Maria started out immediately by regularly beating prisoners and was rewarded for it with advancement within the Nazi prison system, it’s clear that Nazism gave her permission to release the demons already alive within herself.

The first half of the book covers Mandl’s childhood and career, while the second half describes her postwar capture, trial and execution. Even for someone who has been reading Nazi-era history for over half a century, the descriptions of Mandl’s treatment of prisoners are sickening and provoked some sleepless nights. It was a relief to get to that second half of the book, though it was still frustrating. Like nearly every other captured Nazi I’ve ever read about, she denied having done the horrible things presented in evidence, and when cornered always had that “I was only following orders” excuse ready, along with the false claim that she had to do what she did or she’d be severely punished or even executed. She never saw the prisoners as people who had every bit as much right to life as she had. She apologized to one former prisoner, but it didn’t seem sincere to me; it was just a long-shot bid to get a former prisoner to speak up for her. Her only real regrets seemed to be that she’d been captured and would have to face the death penalty, and that her father was, right from the start, sickened at her choice to serve the Nazis.

Eischeid’s psychological theories about Mandl are interesting, but in the end all of Hitler’s henchmen had their reasons, and they all boiled down to a selfish desire for personal benefit of some kind. The only difference in Mandl’s case is that she was female and, unlike most of the big names in Nazi history, a hands-on implementer of the deadly Nazi ideology.

A thoroughly researched book and of value to those interested in what ordinary people may do when given the power of life and death over others.