tamburina:

Maria Mandel (January 10, 1912 - January 24, 1948) was an infamous Austrian for her key role in the Holocaust as a top-ranking official at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp where she is believed to have been directly responsible for the deaths of over 500,000 female prisoners

According to some accounts, Mandel often stood at the gate into Birkenau waiting for an inmate to turn and look at her: any who did were taken out of the lines and never heard from again. In the Auschwitz camps Mandel was known as “The Beast”, and for the next two years she participated in selections for death and other documented abuses. She reportedly often chose so-called “pet” Jews for herself, keeping them from the gas chamber for a time until she tired of them, then sending them to their deaths. Mandel is also said to have enjoyed selecting children to be killed. She created the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz to accompany roll calls, executions, selections, and transports. She signed orders sending an estimated half a million women and children to their deaths in the gas chambers at Auschwitz I and II.