Maria Stromberger

Maria Stromberger was born to a Catholic family[1] in Metnitz, Carinthia, Austria,[2] on 16 March 1898. As a child, she wished to become a nurse. In the 1920s, she moved to Bregenz, Austria, with her sister.[1] Stromberger first worked as a kitchen hand and as a caretaker for her parents.[2] She did not begin studying to be a nurse until she was in her 30s.[1] She studied at the Sanatorium Bregenz-Mehrerau, and then at a nursing school in Heilbronn.[3] After working in Carinthia, she requested to be transferred to Poland, and she began work at an infectious disease hospital in Chorzów on 1 July 1942.[4]^: 463 Here she treated two typhus patients who had been released from the Auschwitz concentration camp. She requested a transfer to Auschwitz, and she began working as a nurse for SS officers[1] on 1 October 1942.[3]

After arriving at Auschwitz, Stromberger was required to sign a document swearing her to silence about the camp.[1] Her intention in transferring was to treat inmates, but this was not allowed.[5] 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.[4]^{: 464–465} Pys became her main contact among the inmates,[2] 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.[1] After she was reported for her kindness to the inmates in 1943, Eduard Wirths warned her she could become a prisoner herself, though he reassured her and discouraged her from transferring.[4]^: 368

Stromberger became increasingly involved with the resistance movement in Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944. She collected information for the group and provided them with additional rations from outside, eventually including pistols and ammunition.[1] When the inmates staged an uprising on 27 October 1944, Stromberger was one of the few non-inmates aware of the plan.[4]^: 467Stromberger 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.[4]^{: 254–255} She found excuses to enter the prisoners' areas of the camp, where nurses typically were not allowed, and provided some of the earliest evidence of the atrocities that took place there. In December 1944, as mass killings became a larger part of operations in Auschwitz, Stromberger was expected to sign a document pledging her support for the killings. Wirths allowed her to refuse.[1] She left Auschwitz in February 1945,[3] as she was transferred from the camp based on an error on her medical history suggesting she suffered from a morphine addiction.[1] The extent she helped the inmates was never discovered while she worked at Auschwitz.[2]

Stromberger gave up nursing after the end of the Holocaust,[1] and she returned to her sister's apartment in Austria.[3] Stromberger was arrested by French forces in Vorarlberg for her involvement with Auschwitz,[4]^: 467 as they believed that she had been involved in the execution of patients. Stromberger wrote to the inmates that she had assisted, who spoke on her behalf.[1] One Polish newspaper ran a front-page article demanding her release, and former resistance leader Józef Cyrankiewicz negotiated her release.[2] She went on to testify against Rudolf Höss in 1947. Stromberger spent the rest of her life as a textile factory worker in Bregenz, and she died of a heart attack on 18 May 1957.[1] Her sister had her cremated in secret, as it was against Catholic teachings, and she buried her urn on 31 August 1957.[3]

Stromberger was a national hero among the Polish resistance, but she lived in relative obscurity in Austria.[2] A depiction of her appeared as a supporting character in the film The Champion in 2020.[6]