Christian Wirth

Christian Wirth (born November 24, 1885 in Oberbalzheim , Alb-Donau-Kreis , † May 26, 1944 near Erpelle in Slovenia ) was a German police officer and SS-Sturmbannführer , who played a key role in " Aktion T4 " and was the first commandant of the extermination camp Belzec and inspector of the extermination camps of " Aktion Reinhardt " was.

Life

Memorial plaque , Herbert-von-Karajan-Strasse 1, in Berlin-Tiergarten

The son of a master cooper learned the sawing trade after attending the elementary and advanced training school. Between 1905 and 1910 he was with the Württemberg Grenadier Regiment 123 , which he left as a non-commissioned officer in the reserve. At his own request, he took part in World War I from September 1914 ; he was wounded that same year. From 1917 he was used as a military policeman in Stuttgart . Wirth was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class and the Golden Württemberg Medal of Merit.

Wirth had already worked as a policeman at the Heilbronn City Police Department in 1910 , but soon moved to Stuttgart and worked there as an investigator for the criminal police . After the end of the war he returned to the criminal police in June 1919 and was promoted to police sergeant a short time later. In 1932 he reached the position of criminal inspector. Wirth was politically active in the state association of police officers in Württemberg, a non-partisan police union.

From 1922 until the party ban in 1923 and then again from January 1, 1931, Wirth was a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 420.383). In June 1933, Wirth joined the SA ; from December 7, 1937 he was a volunteer employee of the Security Service (SD). In April 1939 he switched from the SA to the SS (SS no. 345.464); in October of that year he was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer .

"Action T4"

Death certificate of a " euthanasia " victim, drawn by the "registrar" Christian Wirth, special registry office of the NS killing center Hartheim (1940)

On January 10, 1940, Christian Wirth was ordered by the Reich Criminal Police Office to join the Nazi killing center in Brandenburg for " Aktion T4 ". In January he was a participant in a "trial killing" of 18 to 20 "mentally ill" patients in Brandenburg. Presumably at the instigation of Hitler's personal physician Karl Brandt , the group of people significantly involved in "Aktion T4" was shown a mass killing using CO gas and, for comparison purposes, killing using injections.

Wirth then headed the office departments of the killing centers in Brandenburg , Grafeneck and from spring 1940 in Hartheim . In 1941 he also worked as an office manager at the Hadamar euthanasia facility . In this function he was responsible for the security of the institutions, the special registry offices in which death certificates were officially forged , the staff and the monitoring of the murder process himself. Probably in mid-1940 Wirth was appointed inspector of all "euthanasia" institutions. Viktor Brack later described the duties of this inspector :

“In order to keep the staff at the most moral level possible, Bouhler installed an inspector at my suggestion who drove from institution to institution. He not only tried to organize the leisure time of the prison staff, but at the same time collected all observations that gave cause for criticism. These things were then discussed with the director of the institution to remedy the grievances. Furthermore, at my instigation, when some dishonesty was discovered, two detectives in different positions were mixed with the prison staff who were able to report dishonest elements in a short time [...]. "

"Action Reinhardt"

After the "euthanasia" campaign stopped on August 24, 1941, Wirth, like many other employees of "Aktion T4", switched to " Aktion Reinhardt ". Under the direction of the SS and Police Leader for Lublin , Odilo Globocnik , extermination camps were set up in which around 1.7 to 1.9 million Jews were murdered.

On the basis of statements by Josef Oberhauser , Wirth's presence in the Belzec extermination camp can be proven for the period around Christmas 1941. Wirth became the first commandant of the Belzec extermination camp, which had been under construction since November 1941 and went into operation in March 1942: Here, the victims were murdered in gas chambers into which the exhaust gases of a gasoline engine were discharged. A detailed description was passed on in the report of SS officer Kurt Gerstein , to whom Wirth demonstrated on August 18, 1942, a mass killing of 700 to 800 people.

Probably on August 1, 1942, Wirth was appointed by Odilo Globocnik to inspect the extermination camps of "Aktion Reinhardt". Wirth was the superior of the commanders of the Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps . In this capacity, he replaced the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, Irmfried Eberl , after the killing operation there had collapsed, and replaced him with the previous commandant of Sobibor, Franz Stangl . Wirth reorganized the "Aktion Reinhardt" camps based on his experiences in Belzec, ordered the construction of larger gas chambers and deployed known experts from "Aktion T4" in the camps to optimize the extermination machinery.

From the end of 1942 / beginning of 1943, Wirth was responsible for the clothing factory in the airport warehouse in Lublin: Here, “working Jews” sorted the victims' clothes, valuables and other legacies so that they could then be used by the SS. On January 15, Wirth was promoted to the criminal inspector. In the letter from the Reich Ministry of the Interior it was said that Wirth could be "sure of the special protection of the Führer". In August 1943 he was also promoted directly to Sturmbannführer in the SS, omitting the rank of Hauptsturmführer.

In November 1943, Wirth again supervised the “ Aktion Erntefest ” in Lublin , the killing of around 42,000 Jewish forced laborers from the labor camps there within two days.

Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone

Probably in September 1943 Christian Wirth was transferred to Trieste together with other staff from the "Aktion Reinhardt" . Odilo Globocnik had been appointed Higher SS and Police Leader in the Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone . Wirth became the commander of " Department R " (for Reinhardt), a special department attached to Globocnik's office. The Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp was established in a suburb of Trieste, where an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed. For a much larger number of Jews in particular, San Sabba served as a collection camp for the deportations to the extermination camps.

The German occupation forces became increasingly involved in battles with Italian and Yugoslav partisans . Wirth also acted as security commander for the road from Trieste to Rijeka . On May 26, 1944, Christian Wirth was killed while driving on this road in an attack by partisans. In retaliation, German troops looted Beka and Ocizla (two places southwest of Hrpelje) and then burned them down. His successor in Trieste was Dietrich Allers , who had been managing director of "Aktion T4" since 1941.

Grave in the Costermano military cemetery

After the war, Wirth was buried together with Franz Reichleitner , the 2nd commandant of the Sobibor extermination camp, and Gottfried Schwarz , Wirth's deputy in the Belzec extermination camp, in the German Costermano military cemetery in the province of Verona. Due to a refusal by the then German Consul General Manfred Steinkühler before the day of national mourning in 1988 to pay tribute to the approximately 22,000 German soldiers buried there, if the bones of the three SS men mentioned were not removed from the cemetery, the names of the three were killed as a compromise SS men erased from the cemetery “book of honor” and their ranks removed from the gravestones.

personality

Christian Wirth is an example of a particularly brutal and ruthless SS man who was feared by his own people. This is evidenced by the nicknames given to him by his subordinate SS and Trawniki men : "Christian the Cruel", "The Wild Christian" and "Stuka" for dive fighter aircraft . This picture emerged primarily from the post-war testimony of his subordinates who tried to convince them in their court proceedings that they were in a state of emergency . It is unclear whether Wirth's own people did not fire the fatal shot in his back.

Wirth was undoubtedly a feared superior: This was due to his very direct and often crude choice of words interspersed with dialect expressions. He also took action against irregularities in his own ranks in “Aktion T4”, “Aktion Reinhardt” and in Trieste, in particular against the embezzlement of valuables that had been confiscated from the murder victims.

The statements of SS judge Konrad Morgen in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals are revealing : Morgen described Wirth as a man who was just as proud of his experiences from "Aktion T4" and of his contribution to "optimizing" the mass murders of "Aktion Reinhardt" . From the description of the role of the “working Jews” - one must beat the Jews with their own means - Wirth's anti-Semitism also became clear.

literature

Götz Aly (ed.): Aktion T4 1939–1945. The "euthanasia" headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 . Edition Hentrich, 2nd expanded edition, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-926175-66-4 .
Ernst Klee : "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state. The "destruction of life unworthy of life" . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-10-039303-1 .
Volker Rieß: Christian Wirth. In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul (eds.): Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X , pp. 239-251.
State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg (ed.): Euthanasia in the Nazi state: Grafeneck in 1940. Stuttgart, 2000. ( download )

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Volker Rieß, p. 242. Whether Wirth was already involved in setting up the Nazi killing center in Grafeneck at the end of 1939 has not been proven, but it is possible due to his activities in Stuttgart.
↑ Thomas Vormbaum (Ed.): "Euthanasia" in front of the court. The indictment of the public prosecutor at the Higher Regional Court Frankfurt / M. against Dr. Werner Heyde et al. Of May 22, 1962. Berlin 2005, p. 153 ff.
^ Ernst Klee: "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state. The "destruction of life unworthy of life". 3rd edition Frankfurt a. M. 1983, p. 375. According to Klee, Wirth was in Hadamar et al. a. responsible for the "registry office", d. H. the bureaucratic concealment of the mass murder of people with disabilities and mental illness.
↑ Viktor Brack's interrogation of March 31, 1947. In: Dörner, Klaus (Ed.): The Nürnberger Ärzteprocess 1946/47. Verbal transcripts, prosecution and defense material, sources on the environment. Munich 1999. p. 8/01167. For criminal investigations in the killing centers see also: Annette Hinz-Wessels, Petra Fuchs, Gerrit Hohendorf and Maike Rotzoll: For the bureaucratic handling of a mass murder. The “euthanasia” campaign as reflected in new documents. in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1/2005, pp. 79-107.
↑ Gerstein report in www.ns-archiv.de
↑ The time is based on statements by Josef Oberhauser. Written documents are only available for the spring of 1943, which definitely prove Wirth's role as “The Inspector of the SS Sonderkommando”. See Volker Rieß, p. 245.
↑ Quoted in Volker Rieß, p. 243; here also the promotion in the SS.
↑ Michael Wedekind: National Socialist Occupation and Annexation Policy in Northern Italy 1943 to 1945. (= Military History Studies, Volume 38) Munich, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003. ISBN 3-486-56650-4 , pages 310 and 446.
↑ Michael Wedekind: National Socialist Occupation and Annexation Policy in Northern Italy 1943 to 1945. (= Military History Studies, Volume 38) Munich, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003. ISBN 3-486-56650-4 , pages 310, 448 and 454.
↑ A "Mummy" reports: The Office and the Cemetery. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , November 6, 2010.
↑ Record of the morning statements. ( Memento of September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Tomorrow was the defense witness on the question of whether the SS was a criminal organization . Here he kept silent about Wirth's SS membership.

personal data
SURNAME	Wirth, Christian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German police officer and SS-Sturmbannführer
DATE OF BIRTH	November 24, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH	Oberbalzheim , Alb-Danube district
DATE OF DEATH	May 26, 1944
Place of death	near Erpelle , Slovenia

[1] Volker Rieß, p. 242. Whether Wirth was already involved in setting up the Nazi killing center in Grafeneck at the end of 1939 has not been proven, but it is possible due to his activities in Stuttgart.

[2] Thomas Vormbaum (Ed.): "Euthanasia" in front of the court. The indictment of the public prosecutor at the Higher Regional Court Frankfurt / M. against Dr. Werner Heyde et al. Of May 22, 1962. Berlin 2005, p. 153 ff.

[3] Ernst Klee: "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state. The "destruction of life unworthy of life". 3rd edition Frankfurt a. M. 1983, p. 375. According to Klee, Wirth was in Hadamar et al. a. responsible for the "registry office", d. H. the bureaucratic concealment of the mass murder of people with disabilities and mental illness.

[4] Viktor Brack's interrogation of March 31, 1947. In: Dörner, Klaus (Ed.): The Nürnberger Ärzteprocess 1946/47. Verbal transcripts, prosecution and defense material, sources on the environment. Munich 1999. p. 8/01167. For criminal investigations in the killing centers see also: Annette Hinz-Wessels, Petra Fuchs, Gerrit Hohendorf and Maike Rotzoll: For the bureaucratic handling of a mass murder. The “euthanasia” campaign as reflected in new documents. in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1/2005, pp. 79-107.

[5] Gerstein report in www.ns-archiv.de

[6] The time is based on statements by Josef Oberhauser. Written documents are only available for the spring of 1943, which definitely prove Wirth's role as “The Inspector of the SS Sonderkommando”. See Volker Rieß, p. 245.

[7] Quoted in Volker Rieß, p. 243; here also the promotion in the SS.

[8] Michael Wedekind: National Socialist Occupation and Annexation Policy in Northern Italy 1943 to 1945. (= Military History Studies, Volume 38) Munich, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003. ISBN 3-486-56650-4 , pages 310 and 446.

[9] Michael Wedekind: National Socialist Occupation and Annexation Policy in Northern Italy 1943 to 1945. (= Military History Studies, Volume 38) Munich, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003. ISBN 3-486-56650-4 , pages 310, 448 and 454.

[10] A "Mummy" reports: The Office and the Cemetery. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , November 6, 2010.

[11] Record of the morning statements. ( Memento of September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Tomorrow was the defense witness on the question of whether the SS was a criminal organization . Here he kept silent about Wirth's SS membership.