Painful Execution of Therese Brandl *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

In the early morning of January 24th, 1948, inside the walls of Montalupich prison in Kkow, Poland, 21 people were led to a gallows in small groups. Among them were two women. One was Maria Mandal, the former head of the women’s camp at Ashvitz, one of the most feared figures in the entire history of the camps.

The other was her assistant, a 45-year-old Bavarian woman named Theres Brle. Four years earlier, the German Reich had pinned a warmer merit cross on Brle’s chest for what it called her good conduct in the camps. Now, a Polish court had examined that conduct line by line, witness by witness, and reached a different verdict.

This is the story of the woman who counted prisoners at roll call, the survivors who counted her crimes in return, and the medal that became evidence against its own wearer. Before we begin, one thing. Bunker Files tells these stories with the accuracy the victims deserve. Every fact in this video has been checked against trial records and survivor accounts, and anything that could not be confirmed has been left out.

If that standard matters to you, subscribe now because the people at the center of this story were never given a platform in their own lifetime. This channel belongs to them. Theres Brle was born on February 1st, 1902 in Stacand, a small village in the Bavarian Alps, a place of green valleys, church bells, and mountain weather.

Almost nothing is recorded about her early life, which is itself worth pausing on. She was not raised in a laboratory of cruelty. She came from an ordinary corner of Germany, an ordinary village under an ordinary sky. And for the first 38 years of her life, she left no mark on history at all. No arrests, no politics, no recorded ambitions.

If the Reich had never called, she would have lived and died as anonymously as her neighbors. That changed in March 1940 when she arrived at Ravensbrook, the main concentration camp for women to begin her training as a guard. Ravensbrook was more than a prison. It was a school. Roughly 3 and a half thousand women passed through its training system to become overseers.

And the instruction they received was not about keys and schedules. It was about learning to see the women behind the wire as something other than human. New recruits were paired with veterans, walked through the punishments, taught the vocabulary of contempt. Brle learned quickly. She rose to the rank of rapper to Saharin, the report overseer, whose task was to count the prisoners at roll call and hand out punishments when the numbers did not satisfy her.

Hold that image for a moment because roll call is where the heart of this story lives. For the prisoners of the camps, roll call was not an administrative routine. It was a form of torture with a clipboard. Women who had worked 12 hours on starvation rations were forced to stand motionless in ranks, in summer heat, and in killing frost, sometimes for hours on end, while guards counted and recounted.

A single missing prisoner, a single error in the arithmetic, could freeze thousands of women in place through half a night. People collapsed at roll call. People died at roll call and the person who controlled how long it lasted, who decided whether a miscount meant 10 more minutes or 10 more hours was the rapper Tal Saharin.

In March 1942, Brle was among the first group of SS women transferred from Ravensbrook to Awitz in occupied Poland, part of the small founding staff of the women’s section. She began in the laundry and the sorting sheds, supervising prisoners who were forced to sort the belongings of people who had just been murdered. Shoes, coats, spectacles, photographs, children’s clothing, wedding rings pulled from luggage, letters that would never be answered.

The women who worked those sheds testified after the war about what it did to them to handle the possessions of the dead. Hour after hour, day after day, knowing that a guard was watching for the smallest excuse to punish them, and knowing exactly where the owners of those shoes had gone, Brle rose fast. By October 1942, she was posted to the newly opened Awitz 2 at Burkanau, the extermination center itself, where she served as a senior overseer under Margot Dreshel and Maria Mandle, the woman history remembers, as the head of the Awitz

women’s camps. Mandal was her superior, her mentor, and in the end, her companion on the gallows. The two women had risen through the same school, walked the same roll call squares, and signed their names to the same machinery. When history speaks of the women’s camp at Burkanau, it speaks of Mandal first.

But Mandal did not run that camp alone. She ran it through assistance, and the assistant standing closest to her day after day was Theres Brle. One survivor account preserved in the trial record describes exactly what Brle’s authority looked like in practice. During account, one prisoner was found missing. In response, Mandal and her assistant Bralle drove the women out into the street at 1:00 in the morning and made them stand in the frost until noon the following day, 11 hours in a Polish winter for women who were already starving, already sick, already

dressed in rags. The account does not tell us how many of those women survived that night, and we will not invent a number. What we can say with certainty is that this was not an isolated event. It was the system working as designed and Terra’s Brandle was one of its operators, standing warm in her uniform, while the ranks in front of her swayed and fell.

And there was something else, something the court in Kkow would later place at the very center of its verdict, selections. At Burkanau, guards took part in choosing which prisoners would live and which would be sent to the gas chambers. Survivors testified that Brle participated in this process. She stood in front of exhausted, emaciated women and helped decide with a glance and a gesture who would still be alive the next morning.

There is no version of that duty that can be softened. It is the closest a human being can come to holding the power of death itself. And she exercised it as part of her working week. In July 1944, the Reich gave Theres Brle the Warmer Merit Cross. The citation praised her good conduct in the camps. Read that again.

The state looked at everything you have just heard. The frozen roll calls, the sorting sheds, the selections, and called it good conduct worthy of a medal. That medal is one of the most honest documents the Third Reich ever produced because it tells us the cruelty was not a failure of the system. It was the job description and Theres Brle had fulfilled it to her employer’s complete satisfaction.

In November 1944, as the Soviet army approached, Brle was transferred west along with Mandal to the Muelorf forest complex, a subcamp of Daau, where she was demoted back to an ordinary overseer. Little is recorded of her months there, a quiet fading from the center of the machinery to its burning edge.

The Empire of the Camps was contracting westward, and its servants went with it. On April 27th, 1945, with American forces closing in, she fled into the Bavarian mountains back toward the landscape of her childhood. Perhaps believing that the woman who had left that village 7 years earlier could simply dissolve back into it. One more anonymous face among the postwar ruins.

She could not. On August 29th, 1945, the United States Army arrested her in the Bavarian mountains and placed her in a holding camp for questioning. And then the machinery of justice, slower than the machinery of murder, but far more careful, began to move. Poland requested her extradition under the Allied framework for punishing war crimes because her crimes had been committed on Polish soil against people the Polish state now spoke for.

She was handed over along with Mandle and other women of the Awitz staff and transported east back across the border back toward the very ground where her victims had stood. For the first time in her life, Theres Brle traveled to Poland without a uniform, without authority, and without a single soul obliged to obey her.

The Awitz trial opened on November 24th, 1947 in Kov before Poland’s Supreme National Tribunal. 40 former staff members of the Awitz camps sat in the dock. Among them were the former commandant Arthur Lieieber, the SS Dr. Johan Kmer, Maria Mandle, and Theres Brle alongside other women guards including Louisa Dons, Hildigard Leert, and Alice Orlowski.

None of the women pleaded guilty. Each of them, the record notes, worked to diminish her part in the crimes, insisting that her treatment of prisoners had been decent. This trial deserves to be remembered on its own terms. The judges who conducted it were citizens of a country the camps had been built to destroy.

The witnesses were survivors. many still bearing the physical marks of what had been done to them, standing a short train ride from the place itself. And yet the tribunal did not simply condemn everyone in the dock. It weighed evidence case by case. Sentences ranged from death to 3 years imprisonment, and one defendant, Hans Munchch, a doctor who had refused to take part in selections, was acquitted entirely.

The court’s own judgment records why the death sentences were passed. It found that the defendants had tortured prisoners who were already tormented to the extreme and that many of the accused had taken part in killing not under orders but by their own choice for their own satisfaction. On December 22nd, 1947, the verdicts were read.

23 defendants were sentenced to death. TZ Brle was among them, convicted for her participation in the selection of prisoners to be murdered. The court had heard her story from the only people qualified to tell it, the women she had counted at roll call, and it believed them over her. The sentences were carried out on January 24th, 1948 at Montalupich prison in KCO, a building the Gustapo itself had used as one of its most feared prisons during the occupation, a place where Polish resistance fighters had been tortured

and killed throughout the war. There is a weight to that detail. The condemned of Awitz met their end inside walls their own regime had filled with Polish prisoners only a few years before. According to the accounts of that morning, the condemned were executed in small groups one by one, beginning shortly after 7:00.

Maria Mandal and Theres Brle, the commander and her assistant, who had stood together over the roll calls of Burkanau, were among the first to die a week before what would have been Bralle’s 46th birthday. There was no crowd, no ceremony, and no medal. The state that had decorated her no longer existed, and the state that judged her wasted no words on her memory.

But this story should not end at the gallows, because the gallows was never the point. The point is, the people who put her there. Think about what the witnesses at Crackoff accomplished. 3 years earlier, they had been numbers on Brle’s roll call sheet. Forbidden to speak, forbidden to move. Their survival dependent on the mood of the woman counting them.

In that courtroom, the roles were reversed in the most precise way imaginable. Now their words were the count that mattered. Their memory, their testimony, their refusal to let the frozen knights and the selections vanish into silence became the official record of the Polish state and of history itself. Every date they recalled, every name, every detail that survived cross-examination was a brick in a wall that no denial can ever climb.

The women of Burkanau were never supposed to testify. The entire system was engineered so that no witness would remain, so that the sorting sheds would swallow the evidence and the chimneys would swallow the witnesses. Every survivor who stood before the Supreme National Tribunal defeated that engineering. And every name they spoke into the record, including the names of friends who did not live to speak for themselves, is a small permanent victory over the people who ran the camps.

Theres Brle spent seven years being rewarded for cruelty and one morning answering for it. The Reich gave her a medal. The survivors gave the world the truth. Only one of those has lasted, and it is not the one made of metal. Bunker Files will keep telling these stories, one verified case at a time, with the victims at the center where they belong.

If you believe the women who stood through those roll calls deserve to be remembered and the system that broke them deserves to be exposed, subscribe to Bunker Files right now and turn on notifications. Every subscription tells us to keep going. We will see you in the next file.