Christian Wirth
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Christian Wirth (24 November, 1885 - 26 May, 1944) was a senior SS officer during the program to exterminate the Jewish people of occupied Poland during the Second World War, known as Operation Reinhard. He was a top aide of Odilo Globocnik, the overall director of Operation Reinhard, and his responsibility was scaling up the T-4 Euthanasia Program, in which disabled people were murdered by gassing or lethal injection, to the development of extermination camps for mass murder.
Wirth was the chief of the Criminal Police (Kripo) in Stuttgart before being transferred to head the T-4 program. Here he first met Franz Stangl, who described him in a 1971 interview:
'He was a gross and florid man. … When he spoke about the necessity of this euthanasia operation, he wasn't speaking in humane or scientific terms, the way Dr. Werner at T-4 had described it to me. He laughed. He spoke of "doing away with useless mouths", and that "sentimental slobber" about such people made him "puke".' Sereny, Gitta, Into That Darkness: from Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, a study of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka (1974, second edition 1995) page 54 in the Dutch version of the book
In September, 1941, as the T-4 program wound down, Wirth was transferred to Chełmno to start gassing the inmates there. By late March, 1942, gassing of Jews was conducted daily at Chełmno, in gas vans, and also at a new camp at Belzec, where Wirth was also in charge of the technical side. As more camps were planned, Globocnik appointed him to the post of Inspector of Camps. To set up a third camp, at Sobibór, Wirth chose two subordinates from the T-4 program, Franz Stangl and an ex-nurse, Michel Hermann.
During the construction of Sobibor, Wirth visited the incomplete site, and conducted an impromptu gassing of twenty-five Jewish slave-labourers. He liked to carry a whip, and he used it on both Jewish victims and guards. When a yet larger camp, Treblinka, was set up, Wirth took a direct role in reorganising it when the first Kommandant, Dr. Irmfried Eberl, was replaced by Franz Stangl. Later he was involved in the "Harvest Festival" operation, the murder of remaining Arbeitsjuden (Jewish slave-labourers) in November 1943. Wirth was killed by Italian partisans in Trieste in May 1944.
See also
References
- Bresheeth, Hood and Jansz, The Holocaust for Beginners, Icon Books, 1994, ISBN 1-874166-16-1
- Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, Penguin, 1990, ISBN 0-14-013463-8
- Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, Fontana, 1990, ISBN 0-00-637194-9
- Gitta Sereny, The German Trauma, Penguin, 2000, ISBN 0-71-399456-8
External links
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