Born on January 10, 1912, in Münzkirchen, Upper Austria, Mandel served at Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück concentration camps, rising through the ranks until she succeeded Johanna Langefeld as SS-Lagerführerin of Auschwitz-Birkenau. She reported only to the kommandant and participated in selections and other abuses. It is estimated that she sent half a million women and children to die in the gas chambers. At Auschwitz, Mandel was known as the Beast. She was fond of Irma Grese, a guard whom prisoners nicknamed the Hyena of Auschwitz and the Beautiful Beast, and promoted Grese to head of the Hungarian women’s camp at Birkenau (Grese was accused of war crimes during the Belsen trial and hanged at the age of twenty-two). Mandel created the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz and was awarded the War Merit Cross Second Class for her services.

In November 1944, Mandel was assigned to the Mühldorf subcamp of Dachau and Elisabeth Volkenrath replaced her at Auschwitz. The US Army arrested Mandel on August 10, 1945, then handed her over to the Polish People’s Republic in November 1946. She was tried in Kraków during the Auschwitz trial and in November 1947 was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948. She was thirty-six years old.

Witold Pilecki

Pilecki was born on May 13, 1901, to a noble, devoutly Roman Catholic Polish family. He served as a captain in the Polish army during the Polish-Soviet War, the Second Polish Republic, and World War II. During the German invasion of Poland, he served in the Nineteenth Infantry Division as a cavalry platoon commander; then his division was incorporated into the Forty-First Infantry Division, where Pilecki served as second in command.

In October 1939 his division was disbanded and parts of it began to surrender, so Pilecki and his commander went into hiding in Warsaw, where they cofounded the Secret Polish Army, one of the first underground organizations in Poland. This resistance group was later incorporated into the Union for Armed Struggle, later renamed the Home Army. Pilecki later authored Witold’s Report, the first comprehensive Allied intelligence report on Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

In 1940 he presented his plan to enter Auschwitz to gather intelligence and organize inmate resistance. His superiors provided him with a false identity: Tomasz Serafiński. On September 19, during a Warsaw street roundup, he was caught, detained for two days, then sent to Auschwitz and assigned prisoner number 4859. Pilecki organized the underground Union of Military Organizations (ZOW) at Auschwitz, and many smaller organizations at Auschwitz eventually merged with it. ZOW improved inmate morale, provided news from outside, distributed extra food and clothing to members, set up intelligence networks, and trained detachments in the event of a relief attack by the Home Army, arms airdrops, or airborne landing by the Polish First Independent Parachute Brigade, based in Britain. ZOW provided the Polish underground with information about the camp and sent reports to Warsaw starting in October 1940. Beginning in March 1941, the Polish resistance forwarded those reports to the British government in London. When the organization began, Pilecki organized its members into cells of five, so each member was in communication with only four others. If one member was caught, this limited the number of men he could potentially expose under torture.