Maria Stromberger

Maria Stromberger
Stromberger's Auschwitz ID photo
Born	(1898-03-16)16 March 1898 Metnitz, Austria-Hungary
Died	18 May 1957(1957-05-18) (aged 59) Bregenz, Austria
Occupation(s)	Nurse, textile factory worker

Maria Stromberger (16 March 1898 – 18 May 1957) was an Austrian nurse who is best known for supporting the inmates and their resistance movement at the Auschwitz concentration camp during The Holocaust. After training as a nurse in the late 1930s, she heard of the mistreatment of Jewish people and others in Nazi-occupied Poland. Wishing to help the persecuted, she requested a transfer to Poland. After meeting former inmates of Auschwitz, she took a job as the camp's head nurse for SS officers so she would be in a position to assist the inmates.

For two and a half years, Stromberger smuggled food, medicine, weapons, and information to Auschwitz inmates, and she delivered information about the camp and its inmates to the public. Her kind demeanor toward the inmates raised suspicions of the SS guards, but her supervisor Eduard Wirths took a liking to her and overlooked any suspicious activity. She was eventually sent away from Auschwitz due to an error on her medical history.

Following the allied victory and liberation of the concentration camps, Stromberger was arrested along with other Auschwitz staff. She was freed after inmates testified on her behalf, and she went on to assist in the cases against the Nazis Rudolf Höss and Carl Clauberg. She otherwise lived in relative obscurity in Austria until her death of a heart attack in 1957. For her assistance to the inmates, she came to be known in Poland as "The Angel of Auschwitz".

Early life

Maria Stromberger was born to a Catholic family in Metnitz, Carinthia, Austria–Hungary, on 16 March 1898. As a child, she was interested in becoming a nurse. She and her sister Karoline Gerber moved to Bregenz, Austria, after World War I. Stromberger first worked as a kitchen hand and as a caretaker for her parents, and she spent ten years working as a nurse in the Mehrerau Sanitarium. She did not begin studying medicine until she was in her thirties. She studied at the Sanatorium Bregenz-Mehrerau, and then at a nursing school in Heilbronn. She then began work in a military hospital in Carinthia in the early years of World War II. Here she heard stories about the poor conditions in Nazi-occupied Poland, including the persecution of Jewish people. Hoping that she could help, she requested a transfer, despite her sister's warnings. She requested to be transferred to Poland, and she began work at an infectious disease hospital in Królewska Huta (present day Chorzów) on 1 July 1942.

In Chorzów, Stromberger treated two typhus patients who had been released from the Auschwitz concentration camp. The two were violently distressed for the three weeks they were under observation, and after recovering, they explained to Stromberger what they had experienced at Auschwitz. Realizing the suffering that they had experienced, she requested a transfer to Auschwitz so she could treat the inmates. She was informed that inmates were only permitted to receive treatment from inmate physicians, and she was assigned as head nurse for SS officers. No effort was made to verify whether she was a member of the Nazi Party, and no evidence exists that she ever was. She began working at Auschwitz on 1 October 1942, working in the capacity of a German Red Cross nurse.

Auschwitz concentration camp

A plaque honoring Stromberger at Wernberg Castle in Wernberg, Austria

After arriving at Auschwitz, Stromberger was required to sign a document swearing her to silence about the camp. She took the position of Oberschwester, or the matron. At the time she began work at Auschwitz, the outbreak of typhus had spread to the SS guards, and she was responsible for tending to them. Though she was not allowed to treat the inmates, she came into contact with those who were forced to provide labor in the SS infirmary.

From the SS infirmary, Stromberger was able to see inmates being taken to the gas chambers where they were executed. She first gained the trust of an inmate, Edek Pys, after she expressed horror at the suicide of another inmate and asked him more about their treatment in the camp. Her credibility among the inmates was confirmed when she took the blame for contraband milk that an SS officer had discovered among Pys's belongings. Pys became her main contact among the inmates, and through him she made contact with several more inmates who were forced to work in the SS officers' quarters. In secret, she provided them with additional food and medicine. She scheduled her visits to different parts of the camp so that they would not coincide with an SS presence, allowing her to provide rations and information to the inmates as she went about her duties.

Pys contracted typhus in 1943; those who were ill were often chosen for execution as they could no longer work. Stromberger hid the condition while she provided him aid, putting him in the SS infirmary bathroom and informing the officers that they could not enter because it was storing the infected clothes of typhus patients. She smuggled food and medication to him, and she saw to it that all of his work requirements were done. After Pys was liberated in 1945, he credited Stromberger for his survival, describing her as "like a mother" to the inmates. Stromberger was reported by the SS for her kindness to the inmates in 1943. Her supervisor Eduard Wirths had a fondness for her, and he chose to overlook reports about her behavior. He warned her she could become a prisoner herself if she was not more careful, though he reassured her and discouraged her from transferring.

Stromberger learned of the resistance movement of the patients that sought to disrupt the camp's operations and smuggle information out. She became increasingly involved with the resistance in 1943 and 1944. She collected information for the group and provided them with additional rations from outside, eventually including pistols and ammunition. As she did not speak Polish, Stromberger spoke in a code common to the resistance members. When the inmates planned an uprising on 27 October 1944, Stromberger was one of the few non-inmates aware of the plan.Stromberger also helped smuggle information out of Auschwitz on behalf of the inmates, sending reports both of their conditions and of more sensitive information about the camp. Upon receiving a report written by a prisoner, she hid it somewhere inconspicuous, such as among ration cards or in a matchbox. She then made a trip to the store in her nurse's uniform where she would drop it off to a liaison. One of the liaisons speculated Stromberger gained the trust of the inmates because "her serenity and self-control inspired people’s confidence". Stromberger found excuses to enter the inmates' areas of the camp, where nurses typically were not allowed, and provided some of the earliest evidence of the atrocities that took place there. Stromberger considered fleeing to Switzerland in 1944, but the inmates convinced her not to go.

In December 1944, Stromberger fell ill with polyarteritis. Wirths saw to it that she was provided with morphine, though she declined to use it. At the same time, mass killings of Jewish people became a larger part of operations in Auschwitz. Stromberger was expected to sign a document pledging her support for the killings and to assist in carrying them out. The employees who objected were forced to sign anyway, but Wirths allowed Stromberger an exception when she refused. She left Auschwitz in February 1945, as she was transferred from the camp based on an error on her medical history suggesting she suffered from a morphine addiction. Inmate Hermann Langbein believed that the error was a deliberate action by Wirths to get Stromberger transferred out of the camp to keep her safe. The extent of her care for the inmates was not discovered until after she had left Auschwitz.

Later life and death

Stromberger was sent from Auschwitz to see a doctor in Berlin, who falsely confirmed her diagnosis of a morphine addiction. She then spent the next month in Prague while the region was occupied by Nazis. When French forces occupied Vorarlberg, Stromberger's involvement with Auschwitz was made known to them. They arrested her, believing that she had executed patients. She spent several weeks in prison before being relocated to an internment camp for Nazis. Stromberger wrote to the inmates that she had assisted, who spoke on her behalf. One Kraków newspaper ran a front-page article demanding that she be freed. A former resistance leader and future prime minister of communist Poland, Józef Cyrankiewicz, negotiated her release. She was freed on 23 September 1946.

Stromberger gave up nursing following the end of World War II, and she returned to her sister's apartment in Austria. For a time, she considered working as a massage therapist. She eventually took work in a textile factory in Bregenz, where she worked for the rest of her life. Stromberger testified against the commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss in 1947, and she assisted in collecting evidence against the Auschwitz doctor Carl Clauberg in 1956. She was greeted with "storming ovations" when she returned to Poland for Höss's trial. In November 1955, she was named honorary president of the Holocaust survivors' group KZ-Verband. Stromberger died of a heart attack in Bregenz on 18 May 1957. Her sister had her cremated, doing so in secret as it was against Catholic teachings at the time, and buried her urn on 31 August 1957.

Stromberger was a national hero among the Polish resistance, but she lived in relative obscurity in Austria. Among the inmates, she came to be known as "The Angel of Auschwitz". A depiction of Stromberger appeared as a supporting character in the 2020 film The Champion.