Maria Stromberger

Maria Stromberger (1898 to 1957) was an Austrian nurse best known for helping prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp and its resistance movement during the Holocaust. She trained as a nurse in the late 1930s, and on learning how Jewish people and others were being treated in occupied Poland she asked to be transferred there. After meeting former inmates she took a post as head nurse for the camp's SS staff so that she could assist the prisoners. Recruited by the Auschwitz Combat Group, she spent two and a half years smuggling food, medicine, weapons and information to inmates and passing news of the camp to people outside. Her service ended when an irregularity in her medical history led to her reassignment. After liberation she was arrested with other camp staff but released when former inmates testified for her, and she later gave testimony against the camp commandant Rudolf Hoess. She died in Austria in 1957.