Wirth, Christian

Christian Wirth (24 Nov. 1885 – 26 May 1944), SS Sturmbannführer, was a German police officer who was assigned to supervise euthanasia killings in German mental institutions in late 1939. In late 1941, he was assigned to head the Belzec Camp. In August 1942, he became inspector of the Aktion Reinhardt camps. After this operation was terminated in 1943, he was assigned to an anti-partisan unit in northern Italy in late 1943, where he was killed by partisans in May 1944.

There is very little documentation about Wirth’s actual activities. His activities as commandant of the Belzec Camp are obscure, because we only have the two extremely unreliable testimonies of Kurt Gerstein and Rudolf Reder from the immediate postwar period. While Reder did not even mention Wirth, Gerstein described him as “a frail and small man,” when in fact he was tall and broad-shouldered. We furthermore have several brief references to Wirth as a brutal, calloused man, made decades after the war by defendants in West-German trials about crimes allegedly committed at the Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka camps. It stands to reason, however, that those defendants used Wirth as a conveniently dead scapegoat who couldn’t respond to his accusers. Hence, their terse statements must be viewed with skepticism as well.

(For some details, see the index entries for C. Wirth in Mattogno 2004a, 2021b&e, Mattogno/Graf 2023, Graf/Kues/Mattogno 2020.)