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 learned 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 position as the camp's head nurse for (SS) officers to assist the inmates.
After she gained the trust of the inmates, the Auschwitz Combat Group recruited her for resistance activities. For two and a half years, Stromberger smuggled food, medicine, weapons, and information to Auschwitz inmates and delivered information about the camp and its prisoners to the public. Her kind demeanour toward the inmates raised suspicions among SS guards, but her supervisor Eduard Wirths favoured her and overlooked any questionable behaviour. Her service at Auschwitz ended when an irregularity in her medical history led to her reassignment.
Following the Allied victory and liberation of the concentration camps, Stromberger was arrested along with other Auschwitz staff members. She was released after inmates came forward to testify on her behalf. She later provided testimony against Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss and lived in relative obscurity in Austria until her death from a heart attack in 1957.
Early life Maria Stromberger was born on 16 March 1898 in Metnitz, Carinthia, Austria–Hungary, to Maria Lapeiner and Franz Seraphin Stromberger. The youngest of nine children, including three who died in infancy, she was raised in a Catholic family. Her mother owned and operated an inn, whilst her father worked as a clerk for a merchant. The family held a privileged position among the few property owners in the town, having inherited houses through both parental lines. The Strombergers left Metnitz in 1899 and relocated to Emmersdorf, where Franz became an estate manager. Stromberger fell ill at age six and was not expected to survive, but recovered. The family later moved to Kappel am Krappfeld. After completing her compulsory education, Stromberger took a course to become certified as a kindergarten teacher shortly before World War I, though she never pursued a teaching career.
Stromberger moved to Graz when she was 16, where she lived sporadically for the next 22 years. According to a friend she had later in life, Edek Pys, she mentioned experiencing a tragic love when she was young. While in Graz, Stromberger worked in the Grand Hotel Steirerhof, a high-class hotel owned by her cousin Therese Leeb and her cousin's husband Gatten Karl. She left the job in 1916 to care for her ailing mother, who died the following year. By early 1920, Stromberger resided at Pestalozzistrasse 77, sharing the building with Vinzenz Zotter, who became her brother-in-law in December of that year. In early 1921, she returned to Carinthia. Although she registered as a kindergarten teacher during this period, records do not indicate whether she pursued employment in education. Stromberger stayed in Bregenz for a time in the 1920s with her sister, Karoline Gräbnerm, before returning to Graz in 1926 to continue working at the Grand Hotel Steirerhof as a kitchen assistant. She later moved to work at another inn, where she worked with minimal pay until the owner's death in 1937. During this period, she also served as caretaker for her father following his stroke, continuing until his death in July of that year.
Nursing career Stromberger expressed interest in nursing since childhood, but she only began studying on 13 November 1937 at age 39. She began her studies at the Sanatorium Bregenz-Mehrerau before training for a year in the Mehrerau Sanitarium. It was during this time that Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. It is unknown whether Stromberger's training included the more abbreviated Nazi curriculum that included teachings on the Nazi conception of race and genetics. She then attended a nursing school in Heilbronn from 1939 to 1940. Stromberger started her first nursing job at the Klagenfurt District Hospital in Klagenfurt am Wörthersee on 10 October 1940.
She left Klagenfurt to work in Amlach at the on 10 September 1941, where she tended to soldiers of the (the armed forces of Nazi Germany). Here she heard stories about the poor conditions in Nazi-occupied Poland. Feeling compelled by her religious beliefs to help, she requested a transfer to Poland, which was accepted on 1 May 1942.
Stromberger began her service at an infectious disease hospital in Królewska Huta (present-day Chorzów), southern Poland, on 1 July 1942. Her initial patients included two typhus-afflicted former inmates of the Auschwitz concentration camp. They were violently distressed for several weeks and kept in isolation, where, in states of delirium, they spoke about the camp. Upon recovery, they told Stromberger what they had endured at Auschwitz and begged her to keep it a secret, as all three of their lives would be at risk otherwise. When the men mentioned that there were nurses at Auschwitz wearing the same uniform as hers, it occurred to her that she could request a transfer to Auschwitz. The physician at her hospital asked if she had "lost all [her] reasoning" when she said she was transferring to the camp, and Karoline strongly opposed the idea when Stromberger wrote to her. Stromberger travelled to the neighbouring city of Katowice, where she could formally request a transfer. The nursing administration, perceiving her motivation as an ideological devotion to National Socialism, approved her request. No effort was made to verify whether she was a member of the Nazi Party, and no evidence exists that she ever was.
Auschwitz concentration camp Arrival at Auschwitz in October 1942 Stromberger arrived at Auschwitz on 1 October 1942, in the capacity of a German Red Cross nurse. Robert Mulka, a (a mid-level commander), welcomed her to the camp and briefed her on its operations, stressing the importance of secrecy. She was required to sign two documents affirming her silence, including one that forbade her from having conversations with inmates or carry messages outside of the camp on their behalf. Mulka warned her that she would "pay with her head" if she leaked information about the camp. The affair nearly caused her to leave the camp.
Stromberger began her duties on 30 October, serving as head nurse for (SS) officers. Although she had intended to care for the inmates, they were permitted to receive treatment only from inmate physicians. Stromberger was assigned to the SS infirmary as (matron), reporting directly to Eduard Wirths, head of the camp's medical department. In addition to about a dozen nurses who staffed the infirmary, some inmates were forced to work there. She held authority over both the nurses and the inmates. Stromberger was allegedly a strict supervisor, maintaining a reserved demeanour and demanding a great deal of work from those under her authority. She arrived in the midst of a typhus outbreak at Auschwitz, and the severity of the epidemic, coupled with the staff's lack of expertise in infectious disease, quickly made her one of the camp's most valuable medical personnel. Her work kept her in the main facility, AuschwitzI. From the infirmary, she could see inmates being trucked to the gas chambers and the SS on the roof with the poisonous Zyclon B to execute them. She heard the inmates scream as they were taken away.
Gaining trust
Although she was not permitted to treat inmates, Stromberger came into contact with those forced to work in the SS infirmary. They were initially wary of her. She first gained the trust of Edek Pys, who worked in the infirmary's kitchen. On one occasion, as she stood by a window, Stromberger saw an inmate run into an electric fence while being shot at, an incident that caused her to faint. Pys ran down the hall to get assistance from another nurse. She later asked Pys why the inmate did this, so he explained the conditions of the camp and why so many inmates killed themselves. He also told her about his own experiences and why he was imprisoned.
Pys encouraged Stromberger to observe the evening roll call, as most inmates were in worse condition than the ones she worked with in the infirmary. Here she saw visibly starved inmates and the bodies of those who had died working that day. Another inmate had Stromberger observe as members of the SS beat and mutilated Jewish children. Her mental health was severely affected by the sight, and she took several days of sick leave. The inmates came to trust her as they came to understand that she felt horror toward the SS. In an act of defiance, she deliberately used her Austrian dialect despite the Nazi expectation that Austrians integrate as Germans.
The inmates' trust in Stromberger was ascertained when Pys was accused of smuggling contraband. He had been pilfering some of the milk that he was supposed to deliver to the SS. When the SS officer Geiger discovered an inmate with the milk, the inmate identified Pys as the source. Geiger attacked Pys, only to be chastised by Stromberger. She gave Geiger a false story, saying that it was spoiled milk that had been given to SS officers with typhus and venereal disease. She then invited Geiger to drink it; he declined the offer. Without intervention, Pys and the inmate found with the milk would have faced execution. Through word of mouth, Stromberger developed a positive reputation among inmates throughout the facility and became a source of morale, seen by the prisoners as a mother figure. Stromberger gained further credit among the inmates when she provided assistance to , whose frail health when entering the camp gave him a low chance of survival.
Early assistance
Pys became Stromberger's main contact among the inmates, and through him she made contact with several more who were forced to work in the SS officers' quarters. Among others, Stromberger worked in secret with , , Hermann Langbein, Tadeusz Pietrzykowski, and Stanisław Kłodziński. She felt that the notion of Christian charity obligated her to provide for the inmates. Stromberger scheduled her visits to different parts of the camp so they would not coincide with an SS presence, allowing her to provide food, medicine, and information to the inmates as she went about her duties. She worked with Pys and another inmate, Edugeniusz Niedojadlo, to smuggle food meant for the SS officers. This included some of the special allowances reserved for typhus-infected officers, such as chocolate and champagne. When they warned her that she could be killed for what she was doing, she responded that more important people were already being killed. She gave an attic key to Pietrzykowski so he could collect medicine for the others as needed. To protect the infirmary workers from the evening roll call—a demanding hours-long affair—she insisted that she needed help later into the night and retained them until roll call ended.
Pys contracted typhus at the end of 1942; those who were ill were often executed to prevent the disease from spreading. Stromberger hid the condition while she provided him aid, putting him in the SS infirmary bathroom and telling the officers that it was off limits because it was being used to store the infected clothes of typhus patients. He was eventually forced to go to the inmate infirmary, but he was not selected for execution and she then helped fulfill his work responsibilities for him as he recovered his strength.