Background
Christian Wirth was born on 24 November 1885 in Oberbalzheim, Württemberg.
Christian Wirth was born on 24 November 1885 in Oberbalzheim, Württemberg.
As a non-commissioned officer in World War I on the western front, his bravery was rewarded by the golden Military Cross (Militar-Verdienstkreuz) - one of Imperial Germany’s highest decorations. After several years in quiet obscurity, employed as a builder, Wirth re-emerged as a police officer in Württemberg and in the 1930s became notorious for his special methods of investigation in criminal matters, which eventually resulted in his arraignment before the Württemberg Landestag. Nevertheless, by 1939 Wirth had reached the rank of Kriminalkommissar in the Stuttgart criminal police (K.RIPO), a department of the Gestapo under Arthur Nebe.
Towards the end of the year, Wirth was sent to Grafeneck psychiatric clinic for ‘euthanasia duties’, the first of fourteen such institutions in the Reich, where death was eventually to be administered by gassing and lethal injections. Wirth was then transferred to Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, a former prison converted into a euthanasia establishment, where he became the administrative head. At the end of 1939 he carried out the first know n gassing experiments on Germans certified as incurably insane; these were watched by Brack and Bouhler of the Führer's Chancellery, from whom he was to receive orders during his later activities as Inspector of the Extermination Squads at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka in Poland. It was in Brandenburg that the idea of disguising the gas chambers as a shower-room was first perfected, at Bouhler's suggestion.
Wirth's ‘excellent' record in exterminating incurables undoubtedly led to his highly ‘confidential mission' in eastern Poland in the summer of 1941. Since mid-1940 he had been a roving inspector of euthanasia establishments throughout Greater Germany - some of them such as Hadamar and Schloss Hartheim in Austria, which Wirth briefly commanded, were to provide future personnel for the death camps in Poland - and in July 1941, Bouhler and Brack decided to send him to Lublin to set up a new euthanasia establishment, the first outside the Reich. By the end of 1941 Wirth had been assigned to begin the extermination of Jews in Chelmno (Kulmhof), the first of five Nazi death camps in Poland to become operational. During the next eighteen months, he was given responsibility for overseeing the murder of more than two million Jews in the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, in co-ordination with Odilo Globocnik and the SS police headquarters in Lublin.
Following the liquidation of the Belzec camp by the autumn of 1943, Wirth was promoted to SS-Sturmbannfuhrer and, together with his commando, was sent by Himmler to Trieste in Yugoslavia to join other German units.
According to one account, Wirth was killed in street fighting with Yugoslav partisans on 26 May 1944. He may also have been the victim of a Jewish vengeance squad organized to hunt down Nazi mass murderers.
Wirth, a gross and brutal individual, whose verbal coarseness and cruelty richly earned him the epithet, ‘the savage Christian', prided himself on the system of terror he evolved in the extermination camps and the efficiency of the methods of gassing which he designed. He also claimed to have pioneered the use of Jewish Sonderkommandos - thereby forcing physically stronger Jews to bury their own people, before they, too, were killed. Though his bragging was notorious among his staff, there can be no doubt that as Commandant of Belzec he did have a hand in the evolution of new gassing techniques.
Quotes from others about the person
A survivor of the Belzec camp, where 600,000 Jews were murdered, recalled Wirth as ‘a tall, broad-shouldered man in his middle 40s, with a vulgar face - he was a born criminal. The extreme beast. . . . Although he seldom appeared, the SS men were terrified of him. He lived alone waited on by his Ukrainian batman, who delivered reports to him from the camp each day.’