Christian Wirth
Christian Wirth was born in Oberbalzheim in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, in 1885. He joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP – commonly referred to as the Nazi Party) in 1922; became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA – the Nazi Party’s first paramilitary group) in 1933 and the Schutzstaffel (SS – a paramilitary group replacing the SA) in 1939. Wirth participated in the euthanasia programme Aktion T4 from 1939 as an Inspector and was responsible for the euthanasia centres in Germany and Austria.
In 1942, he was given charge of the SS special command Aktion Reinhardt and became senior officer in charge of the extermination camps at Belzec (Germany), Sobibor (German-occupied Poland) and Treblinka (German-occupied Poland). Wirth was responsible for organising the working structure of camp personnel and the method for the ‘implementation’ of the mass gassings. Aktion Reinhardt resulted in the murder of around 1.6 to 1.8 million Jews and 50,000 Sinti and Roma as well as non-Jewish Poles.
Aktion Reinhardt was wound down in 1943, and Wirth was transferred to the Task Force Operation R (Sonderabteilung Einsatz R) in Trieste, where he established the concentration camp Risiera di San Sabba in the ‘Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral’ (Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland).
Wirth was shot by Yugoslav partisans during a street battle on 26th May 1944 and buried in Opicina. In 1944, Wirth was buried with military honours and in the presence of members of Unit R in the Opicina war cemetery near Trieste. He was reburied in Costermano in 1959.
In 1976, Franz Suchomel talked about his post in Treblinka in an interview. SS-Unterscharführer (SS-Lieutenant) Suchomel, who had been detailed to the extermination camp in 1942, described Wirth as the most brutal human being he had ever met and as a ‘Jew hater’.