Christian Wirth

Christian Wirth was a criminal police officer from Stuttgart who during the war became one of the chief organisers of mass murder. First, as inspector of the Aktion T4 centres, he made sure that German psychiatric patients were killed efficiently; then, as the first commandant of the Bełżec extermination camp, he worked out the method the Germans repeated at Sobibór and Treblinka: gas chambers fed with engine exhaust, deceiving the victims to the very last moment, and forcing Jewish prisoners to work in the killing process. From August 1942 he was inspector of all the camps of Operation Reinhard, in which about one and a half million Jews were murdered. In the autumn of 1943 he was transferred to the Adriatic, where in May 1944 he was killed by Yugoslav partisans. He never stood trial; his former subordinates later blamed him for everything.

A policeman from Stuttgart

He was born on 24 November 1885 in Oberbalzheim in Upper Swabia, in what was then the Kingdom of Württemberg, into a Protestant family. He left school at 14 and was apprenticed to a carpenter. In 1905–1907 he did his military service in a grenadier regiment in Ulm, then served for two more years as an instructor. In 1910 he joined the Württemberg police and married Maria Bantel, with whom he had two sons. In 1913 he moved from the uniformed police to the criminal police in Stuttgart.

In October 1914 he volunteered for the army and until 1917 fought on the Western Front in the 246th Reserve Infantry Regiment. He was wounded twice, received the Iron Cross of both classes and rose to the rank of acting officer. At the end of the war he guarded military depots in Stuttgart.

After the war he returned to the criminal police and was quickly promoted; by 1923 he headed a Stuttgart precinct dealing with theft and robbery. He had a reputation as an effective investigator, but also as a man brutal towards subordinates and suspects under interrogation. According to his Polish biography he first joined the Nazi Party in 1922, left it after the Beer Hall Putsch and rejoined in 1931. In 1937 he became an informer for the SD, and in 1939 a criminal police commissioner. After the outbreak of war he spent short periods in Vienna and in Olomouc, where he organised the criminal police in the Protectorate, and on 1 October 1939 he joined the SS.

Inspector of Aktion T4

In the autumn of 1939 Wirth was assigned to the secret programme for murdering the mentally ill and disabled, named Aktion T4 after the war. It is not known exactly why he was chosen; historians suppose that his reputation as an efficient and ruthless officer was decisive. Around the turn of 1939 and 1940 he witnessed the first trial gassings with carbon monoxide at Brandenburg, then ran the administration of the centre at Grafeneck in Württemberg and supervised the installation of a gas chamber at Hartheim Castle near Linz. In May 1940 he became inspector of all the “euthanasia” centres.

He saw to secrecy, to the camouflage of the centres and to ensuring that the victims did not know what awaited them until the end. He also dealt with personnel matters and came down hard on both theft and the “weakness” of subordinates, by which he meant reluctance to take part in the killing. At Hartheim he was met by Franz Stangl, later commandant of Sobibór and Treblinka, who years afterwards spoke of his coarseness and cruelty. When in August 1941 Hitler ordered the gassing of patients to stop, the men and the experience of T4 were soon put to use murdering Jews.

First commandant of Bełżec

In the autumn of 1941 the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District, Odilo Globočnik, agreed with the heads of the Führer’s Chancellery, Philipp Bouhler and Viktor Brack, that T4 personnel would be lent to him. On 1 November construction began at Bełżec of the first extermination camp in the General Government, and on 22 December 1941 Wirth arrived there as commandant. At the beginning of January 1942 he brought in his former T4 subordinates from the centre at Bernburg. He wore the uniform of a police captain and lived in a house on Lwowska Street, which also housed the camp headquarters.

It was at Bełżec, under his supervision, that the method of killing later adopted by the other Operation Reinhard camps was settled. Wirth, who already knew both stationary chambers using bottled carbon monoxide and gas vans, considered both inadequate and decided to kill in stationary chambers with engine exhaust. According to the USHMM, the first victims of the trial gassings were Jews from the surrounding area; on 17 March 1942 the first transports arrived from Lublin and Lwów and mass extermination began. The camp was designed so that neither the chambers nor the graves could be seen from the ramp, and new arrivals were told that a bath and disinfection awaited them. In the early days the speeches were often given by Wirth himself. The work of unloading transports, in the undressing rooms and burying the bodies was done by Jewish prisoners who were spared for a time, and those who could no longer work were shot.

Wirth introduced a reign of terror in the camp that was feared not only by the prisoners but also by the SS men and the Trawniki guards. He was never without a whip, beat his subordinates and punished those who asked for a transfer. The Germans called him “Wild Christian”, and the guards called him “Stuka”, after the dive bomber. In mid-April 1942 he unexpectedly left for the Reich and the transports stopped for several weeks, while part of the staff was sent to the camp being built at Sobibór. Wirth was there for the first trial gassings and gave instructions to the new commandant, Stangl (the start of killing at Sobibór). On his return to Bełżec he had larger, brick-built chambers constructed. According to Robert Kuwałek, more than 120,000 Jews were murdered at Bełżec by the end of his time as commandant. His successor was Gottlieb Hering – in August according to Polish studies, as early as June 1942 according to the USHMM. By December 1942, according to various estimates, between about 434,000 and 450,000 people had been killed at Bełżec.

Inspector of the extermination camps

On 1 August 1942 Globočnik appointed Wirth inspector of the SS special detachments of Operation Reinhard, that is, of all three extermination camps: Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. At the end of August he went to Treblinka, where under the commandant Irmfried Eberl chaos reigned: the chambers could not keep up, bodies lay unburied and trains from the Warsaw Ghetto waited in the sidings. Wirth spent several weeks reorganising the camp – he divided it into zones and had a ramp and new, larger gas chambers built – and then handed it over to Stangl. Witnesses from the staff recalled that he personally showed SS men how to kill prisoners who could not walk to the chambers with a shot to the back of the head.

As inspector he toured the camps and made sure the Bełżec solutions were applied in them; he also moved T4 men between the camps. He accompanied dignitaries on inspections, among them Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann. On 19 August 1942 he showed Kurt Gerstein (PL), the SS officer responsible for disinfectants, around Bełżec; Gerstein witnessed the gassing of a transport from Lwów and after the war gave one of the most important accounts of it. It was Wirth who insisted that the Operation Reinhard camps should go on killing with exhaust gas rather than Zyklon B.

From around the turn of 1942 and 1943 he was also in charge of the labour camp at the Lublin Flugplatz (PL), where the property plundered from the victims was sorted; most researchers consider that he was formally its commandant from March 1943. Prisoners remembered him as a man who rode about the camp on horseback beating them with a whip. In 1943 he was promoted to police major and SS-Sturmbannführer. In the Operation Reinhard camps the Germans murdered, according to the USHMM, about 1.5 million Jews, and in the operation as a whole – including mass shootings – about 1.7 million. The Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad wrote that Wirth had a greater influence on the daily life and suffering of the prisoners in the operation’s camps than any of the commandants.

Trieste and death

After the Sobibór uprising and the closure of the camps, most of the Operation Reinhard men were transferred to the Adriatic, to the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral, where Globočnik had become Higher SS and Police Leader. Wirth arrived in Trieste in September 1943, together with Stangl and Josef Oberhauser. He commanded the Einsatz R unit, made up mainly of veterans of the extermination camps, which fought the partisans, deported local Jews and set up in Trieste a police camp in the San Sabba rice mill. According to the most common estimates, between 3,000 and 5,000 people were murdered there.

On 26 May 1944 Wirth was driving to inspect a unit at Fiume. Near Kozina (Erpelle), outside Trieste, he ran into an ambush laid by Yugoslav partisans and was killed. In his conversations with Gitta Sereny Stangl suggested that he might have been killed by his own men, but historians accept the partisan version. He was buried with military honours in the cemetery at Opicina, and his remains were later moved to the German war cemetery at Costermano (PL) on Lake Garda; after protests his name was removed from the cemetery’s registers.

Memory and responsibility

Wirth died before he could be tried, and in the post-war investigations he became a convenient scapegoat. During the West German investigation into Bełżec, former members of the staff unanimously spoke of his terror and claimed that refusal would have cost them their lives. This line of defence proved successful: in January 1964 a court in Munich dropped the proceedings against seven of the eight defendants, finding that they had acted under a subjective sense of duress. Only Oberhauser was convicted, in 1965, and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Stangl, questioned after his arrest, likewise shifted the responsibility for the killing onto Wirth.

Historians judge him unequivocally. Dariusz Libionka considers that he played “the most sinister role in the extermination of the Polish Jews” and was one of the greatest Nazi criminals. It was he who combined the experience of T4 with the organisation of the extermination camps on Polish soil and created a system in which a small German staff, supported by guards and by prisoners forced to work, could murder thousands of people from a single transport within a few hours.