How striking was the contrast between female SS guards walking in their elegant uniforms and neatly polished officer boots and senior prisoner functionaries(…). The former were well-fed, strong and healthy, so that their moves were smooth and light. Some of them were quite pretty, even nice, until the moment they got furious and started to beat. Then their faces changed and they became cruel (…) with their eyes showing evil and their movements demonstrating arrogance and obsession with power. Most of them were just a nobody in their regular civil lives, but here they were important individuals entitled to decide about the life or death of hundreds of women.

Mandl was regarded as particularly evil and was a nightmare for all women in the camp. She beat, shouted at and was cruel towards prisoners for very trivial reasons or frequently she mistreated them for no reason at all. For instance, she used to impose a punishment on prisoners after a day of extremely hard labour or called additional evening roll calls, where women had to kneel down with their hands up. Such roll calls lasted two or three hours with women fainting or even dying in their course.

The female SS guard Drechsel was famous for conducting selections at the gate of Birkenau. With a long stick she beat those selected to die in the gas chamber.

One day, just after a roll call I attracted the attention of Hasse (…). She approached me and as she did not like the way I wore my scarf, I suddenly felt a strong pain. I got slapped across my face twice so hard that I went deaf for a moment (…).

I knew Therese Brandl from the times she was a supervisor of the clothing room (Bekleidungskammer) and already in this position she proved to be a ruthless person harassing prisoners for no reason at all. She continuously declined to provide the prisoners with clothing or underwear she had in her clothing room, even if the camp regulations allowed her to do so. As a result, many prisoners were freezing during winter, while the sick ones had to lie down in camp hospital entirely naked.

In Birkenau I also met the defendant Danz. Female prisoners fainted as they saw her, because she harassed women by beating and kicking. One day during a roll call, I saw Danz slapping a female prisoner so hard across the face that she fell down and Danz mistreated her with her shoes showing no mercy.

Email Macha did not belong to the worst guards. I have never seen her beating or selecting prisoners. It is reported that she occasionally warned prisoners in Polish that a supervisor (Oberaufseherin) was coming in order to protect them from beating. Some women even called her “Mutti” (…). She frequently helped prisoners to contact people from outside the camp.