Maria Stromberger

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.

Early life
Maria Stromberger was born on 16 March 1898 to Maria Lapeiner and Franz Seraphin Stromberger in Metnitz, Carinthia, Austria–Hungary. Stromberger had eight elder siblings, five of whom survived infancy. Her parents operated an inn owned by her mother, and her father also worked as a clerk for a merchant. Although the family was not wealthy, they were among the few property owners in their town because both of Stromberger's parents had inherited houses. Stromberger was raised Catholic.

The family left Metnitz in 1899 and moved to other parts of the region, relocating to Emmersdorf where Franz became an estate manager. Stromberger fell ill when she was six years old and was expected to die before she ultimately recovered. They later moved to Kappel am Krappfeld. Stromberger took a class to be certified as a kindergarten teacher shortly before World War I, but never followed through with finding a teaching job.

Stromberger moved to Graz when she was 16, where she lived sporadically for the next 22 years. While in Graz, she worked in the Grand Hotel Steirerhof, a high-class hotel owned by her cousin and her cousin's husband. She left the job in 1916 to care for her ailing mother, who died the following year. Stromberger stayed in Bregenz, Austria, for a time in the 1920s. She had accompanied her sister, whose poor eyesight meant that she needed Stromberger as a caretaker. She returned to Graz in 1926 to keep working at the Grand Hotel Steirerhof. She moved to work at another inn, where she worked with minimal pay until the owner's death in 1937. When her father had a stroke, she became his caretaker until his death in July 1937.

Nursing career
Stromberger was interested in becoming a nurse since childhood, but she did not begin studying medicine until after her father's death, when she was 39 years old. She began her studies on 13 November 1937, first at the Sanatorium Bregenz-Mehrerau, before training for a year in the Mehrerau Sanitarium. Stromberger then attended a nursing school in Heilbronn from 1939 to 1940. She began working at the Klagenfurt District Hospital in Klagenfurt on 10 October 1940.

Stromberger left Klagenfurt to work in Amlach at the Lienz District Hospital on 10 September 1941, where she tended to Wehrmacht soldiers. Here she heard stories about the poor conditions in Nazi-occupied Poland, including the persecution of Jewish people. By her religious convictions, she felt compelled to help. Despite her sister's warnings, Stromberger requested a transfer to Poland. It was approved on 1 May 1942.

Arriving in Poland, Stromberger began work at an infectious disease hospital in Królewska Huta (present day Chorzów) on 1 July 1942. In Chorzów, she treated two typhus patients who had been released from the Auschwitz concentration camp. The two were violently distressed for several weeks and kept in isolation. 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, hoping she would be able to help the inmates. The administration interpreted this as an expression of support for Nazism, and she was permitted to work in the camp.

Auschwitz concentration camp
Upon transferring to Auschwitz, Stromberger 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.

After arriving at the camp, 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. He and several other inmates described her as being like a mother to them. 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, ammunition, and explosives. In December 1943, Stromberger smuggled a feast, including wine and champagne, into the infirmary to hold a Christmas party in the attic for the inmates forced to work there. 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 what 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. Employees were forced to sign even when they objected, but Wirths allowed her an exception when she refused.

Stromberger left Auschwitz in February 1945. She was transferred from the camp based on an error in 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 safely moved away from the camp before her actions were discovered. 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 and took classes on it. She eventually took work in a textile factory in Bregenz. 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.

Stromberger maintained contact with the prisoners of Auschwitz for the rest of her life. Stromberger died of a heart attack in Bregenz on 18 May 1957, following a dentist appointment in which she had ten teeth pulled. 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.

Legacy
Stromberger was a national hero among the Polish resistance, but she lived in relative obscurity in Austria. She was named an honorary member of the Austrian Union of Former Prisoners of Concentration Camps at the end of the war, and she was named honorary president of the Holocaust survivors' group KZ-Verband in November 1955. Her apolitical nature prevented her from being recognized to the extent of other resistance figures as she assisted both nationalists and communists, and neither considered her part of their respective movements.

Obituaries celebrating her were written in Austrian newspapers such as the communist Volksstimme and Catholic Die Furche, but among Austrians the full extent of her actions in Auschwitz were only known to a few people. Her correspondences and other documents related to her actions were preserved by her niece, Hedwig Gerber. A depiction of Stromberger appeared as a supporting character in the 2020 film The Champion.