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.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for giving me a free eARC of this book to read in exchange for my review!

Thank you, Kensington Books and NetGalley, for the advanced copy of Mistress of Life and Death.

I think that a lot of people learn about women's roles in the fight against the Axis alliance, but we don't learn a lot about women's roles in the fight for the Axis alliance. While there were very few women who took rank alongside the men, those that did climb the ranks in the Nazi regime seem to have been overlooked by history books. The author did extensive research spanning the course of a decade, and I believe that this should be required reading. While I did have a couple of nightmares while reading this one, I am thankful that I had the ability to put the book down and step away when needed whereas so many were not lucky enough to be able to escape Maria Mandl's story as easily. I don't want to say that this was an enjoyable read or that I really liked it but rather I have an appreciation to Susan J. Eischeid for taking the time to educate readers.

3.5 This is a highly detailed and well researched story of one of the brutal female Nazis. I’d hope to gain some insight into the atrocities that women, in particular, committed during WWII. However, it seems that Maria M’s descent into barbarism was casual, ordinary, and shockingly routine. Maybe it is good I don’t understand her actions. I did get a better, clearer picture of Auschwitz’s camps and how they were created and organized. I’d also never thought of how it must’ve been to work in a concentration camp or manage personnel in such a setting. I’m not sure how I even feel about saying that. The book is well written and broken into short, focused chapters, which makes it easy to take breaks from the content. I appreciated that. I’ll be thinking through this one for awhile,

An interesting look at the life of Nazi Maria Mandi. Overall I thought this was an interesting read. I wasn’t familiar with Maria before reading this. Usually I read these types of books via audiobook and I think I would have enjoyed that format more, but for readers of history and biographies I think this will be popular!

Tells the oft forgotten story of Maria Mandl and the horror she inflicted upon the prisoners of the various concentration camps she ran as a head guard before and during World War II. It is important when discussing the misdeed of historical figures, particularly the most heinous, to view them through the lens of their own innate humanity. It is a a difficult task but a very important one. We would never be able to recognize the lessons that history can teach us if we wrote off every maniacal figure as the sum of their most evil parts. Because that simply isn't true. The real horror of these stories as is present in the case of the Nazis is that these were a group of basically decent people who would have gone on to live basically normal lives had this extraordinary set of circumstances not arisen. These normal people became depraved, devoid of all human empathy and emotion. It is important to understand that. These were not monsters, these were people who had families and spouse and children that they loved and who loved them. And yet the descended down a path of mass murder and inconceivable destruction and destitution. They were human and they were evil. One cannot understand the latter without first understanding the former. Maria Mandl was among the worst of her kind. This book discusses her descent from the Catholic daughter of a shoemaker to tyrannical mass murder who gleefully participated in Nazi depravity. Within human nature there is both good and evil, and it is important for the furtherance of our species to understand how one can go from one to the other. And the thorough appraisal of history should be done to remind us that often the nexus between the two is much thinner than we would like to imagine. This is a great book that does a great job of managing to depict a person, when it would have been far easier to depict a monster.

4.5 stars! All in all, it was an engrossing, informative, and thorough biography. of Maria Mandl. Full review is posted to my page due to length..

I read many books about the Holocaust, with a close family friend having been a survivor. I feel it's our duty to never forget. I also, though, often wonder how humans can commit the atrocities that they do. This book was difficult for me, because I can read about Maria Mandl's background, try to think of her as a child, then adult, I can't reconcile how someone turns in this manner. It's not a light read, but it's a necessary read. Thank you to Kensington Books and NetGalley for a digital advance of this title in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

Initially it was the title that caught my attention. My favorite genre is historical. I have read many books regarding the holocaust. This book stands out from the rest. I have not read a book dealing with Maria Mandl before. As I was reading through, I was able to piece together parts of her story with parts of others, such as the orchestra. The stories of this particular guard we're disturbing to say the least. I had to have a second "lighter" book to read when this one became too deep. I would recommend this book to any history buff!

The literature and history of The Holocaust is vast and too often assumed to be thorough. But, few authors have sought to explore and trace the early life, family and molding of an individual who willingly gave themselves over so completely to the utterly complete brutality of the concentration camp and the power attainable by following the rules of a system of murder and depravity. Susan Eischeid’s portrait of Maria Mandl…Head Overseer of The Women’s Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau..is thorough and filled with first-person accounts and interviews that trace the arc of Mandl’s life and obedient service to pure horror. There was no reason for this daughter of a nice and moral family to have become an “unimaginable monster.” But Eischeid provides us with a life story that allows us to follow an individual’s descent into unending brutality and mass murder.

I have read quite a few books on the Holocaust, particularly regarding life at the different concentration camps but none have hit me as hard as this one. What's a bit unnerving about it is that this story is about Maria Mandl who was the highest ranking female of the womens camp at both Ravensbruck and Auschwitz. I had never heard of her before. The story is told after 10 years of extensive research done by the author and countless interviews with Holocaust survivors who remembered Maria well. This woman was evil in its purest form. Rarely has a book affected me like this one did - I actually had a disturbing dream or two while reading it. This woman got off easy compared to the hell she put others through. An excellent, but very emotional read. Thank you to NetGalley, the author and publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion.