Maria Cecilia Autsch was born in Röllecken, part of Attendorn in the Olpe district of (Westphalia), German Empire on 26 March 1900.

The terrible economic situation in the Weimar Republic meant that she had to go out to work in the clothing store Bischoff & Broegger in Finnentrop, where she was popular amongst both fellow workers and customers Maria was thirty-three years old when she joined the Trinitarian Sisters of Valence in Mötz, Austria.

She happened to meet some women she knew at the dairy and, conversing with them, she related that the Allies had sunk a German ship off Norway and many had died in that disaster.

[5] The Nazis sent Sr. Angela to Auschwitz concentration camp where she befriended a Jewish woman doctor from Slovakia, Margarita Schwalbova.

[6] 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.

In March 1943, Sister Angela was transferred to Birkenau, another camp, where she worked in the kitchen and infirmary, caring equally for inmates and persecutors.