Since the
Gauleiter at that time wanted to report a "monastery-free Tyrol" to Hitler on his birthday in April 1939, the convent in Mötz was to be confiscated. When the
Nazi party tried to expropriate the convent, Sr. Autsch, who represented the mother superior, succeeded in saving it by claiming the Tyrolean monastery was Spanish property. The Gestapo opened a file on Sr. Angela and arrested her on 12 August 1940. She was jailed for seventeen days in Innsbruck before, without a trial, becoming prisoner no. 4651 in the concentration camp of
Ravensbrück on 31 August 1940; as a political inmate she had to wear a
red triangle. In Ravensbrück, she was a light of hope and courage to her fellow inmates. She was frequently beaten by her captors but her contagious good humor was "a ray of sunshine in deepest Hell". Some prisoners who might have killed themselves were inspired by her, they said afterwards, even those who had no idea that she was a religious sister. After a few weeks, she was sent to the infirmary, where she cared for postpartum women, worked in the laundry, and served as a cook. She used this opportunity to secretly distribute medication and soap to fellow prisoners. In March 1942, the Nazis sent Sr. Angela to
Auschwitz concentration camp, along with a transport of a thousand female prisoners who were to be used to build a women's concentration camp. In Auschwitz, Sr. Angela befriended a Jewish doctor from Slovakia, Margarita Schwalbova. Feeling depressed and less than human, Schwalbova was deeply moved when the sister went up to her and gently stroked her hair. Although Schwalbova was an atheist, she and Sr. Angela became friends, with the latter acting in a way that earned her the byname "Angel of Auschwitz". When Schwalbova was sick, she told her stories about the lives and miracles of the saints, and shared her meager rations with her and others even though this was strictly forbidden. Sr. Angela told Schwalbowa, that she was arrested for "insulting the Führer and inciting the population". In March 1943, Sr. Angela was transferred to Birkenau, the extermination camp, where she worked in the kitchen and infirmary. In October, she contracted typhus, from which she never fully recovered. On 15 May 1943 she was sent to the camp's SS hospital, where she cared for her torturers. She was even offered to be released from the concentration camp as a free nurse if she left her religious congregation, but refused. Sr. Angela died in an Allied air raid on 23 December 1944, just a month before the Soviet Red army liberated the camp. Her body was burned in the concentration camp crematorium. Her
mother superior, Michaela Roth CSST, who recorded the basic information of every sister of the congregation, wrote: "Died on 23 December 1944, as a
martyr in Auschwitz concentration camp in
Silesia, where she had to spend four and a half years. ==Beatification process==