Eduard Wirths
Encyclopedia
Eduard Wirths was the Chief SS doctor (SS-Standortarzt) at the Auschwitz concentration camp
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...

 from September 1942 to January 1945. Thus, Wirths had formal responsibility for everything undertaken by the nearly 20 SS doctors (including Josef Mengele
Josef Mengele
Josef Rudolf Mengele , also known as the Angel of Death was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University...

, Horst Schumann
Horst Schumann
Horst Schumann , SS-Sturmbannführer and medical doctor, conducted cruel sterilization and castration experiments at Auschwitz and was particularly interested in the mass sterilization of Jews by means of X-rays....

 and Carl Clauberg
Carl Clauberg
Carl Clauberg was a German medical doctor who conducted medical experiments on human beings in Nazi concentration camps during World War II...

) who worked in the medical sections of Auschwitz between 1942–1945.

Early life

Eduard Wirths was born in Geroldshausen
Geroldshausen
Geroldshausen is a municipality in the district of Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany....

 near Würzburg
Würzburg
Würzburg is a city in the region of Franconia which lies in the northern tip of Bavaria, Germany. Located at the Main River, it is the capital of the Regierungsbezirk Lower Franconia. The regional dialect is Franconian....

, Bavaria
Bavaria
Bavaria, formally the Free State of Bavaria is a state of Germany, located in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the largest state by area, forming almost 20% of the total land area of Germany...

 into a Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

 family with democratic Socialist leanings. His father served as a medical corpsman in the First World War and according to Dr. Robert Jay Lifton
Robert Jay Lifton
Robert Jay Lifton is an American psychiatrist and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of war and political violence and for his theory of thought reform...

 had emerged from the war "...in a depressed state with pacifist leanings, which were undoubtedly expressed in his (as one son put it) 'making doctors of us all...'" ( Lifton: p. 385) Wirth's younger brother, Helmut, became a notable gynecologist (who later went to Auschwitz to visit his brother to participate in cancer experiments but left after only a few days due to his horror at what he had seen there). According to Lifton "...Among the boys it was Eduard who came most under the father’s influence in becoming meticulous, obedient, and unusually conscientious and reliable — traits that continued into his adult life. He never smoked or drank and was described as compassionate and "soft" in his responses to others..." (Lifton, p. 385) The Wirths family was not known to be anti-semitic or sympathetic to radical nationalist politics.

Nazi party membership

Eduard Wirths, however, became an ardent Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

 while studying medicine at the University of Würzburg
University of Würzburg
The University of Würzburg is a university in Würzburg, Germany, founded in 1402. The university is a member of the distinguished Coimbra Group.-Name:...

 (1930–35). He joined the Nazi Party and the SA
Sturmabteilung
The Sturmabteilung functioned as a paramilitary organization of the National Socialist German Workers' Party . It played a key role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s...

 in June 1933 and applied for admission into the SS in 1934. He entered the Waffen SS in 1939, saw action in Norway and the Russian Front and was classified as medically unfit for combat duty in the spring of 1942 after a heart-attack. Wirths then chose to undertake special training for Department leaders in Dachau Concentration Camp and served as chief SS doctor in Neuengamme concentration camp during July 1942. Coincidentally, in 1942 Josef Mengele
Josef Mengele
Josef Rudolf Mengele , also known as the Angel of Death was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University...

 was also wounded at the Russian Front, pronounced medically unfit for combat, promoted to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer before being assigned to Auschwitz.

Auschwitz (1942-45)

Dr. Wirths was promoted to SS Hauptsturmführer
Hauptsturmführer
Hauptsturmführer was a Nazi rank of the SS which was used between the years of 1934 and 1945. The rank of Hauptsturmführer was a mid-grade company level officer and was the equivalent of a Captain in the German Army and also the equivalent of captain in foreign armies...

 (captain) and appointed as chief doctor at Auschwitz in September 1942. He was appointed on the basis of his reputation as a competent doctor and committed Nazi who would be capable of stopping the typhus
Typhus
Epidemic typhus is a form of typhus so named because the disease often causes epidemics following wars and natural disasters...

 epidemics that had increasingly affected SS personnel at Auschwitz (an effort in which he was somewhat successful).

At Auschwitz, Wirths was known to be protective of prisoner doctors and other prisoners doing medical work, to have improved conditions on the medical blocks and was remembered favourably by most prisoner doctors and other inmates who had contact with him. At the same time, Wirths in recommending Dr. Josef Mengele for promotion in August 1944, was able to speak of Mengele's "open, honest, firm … [and] absolutely dependable" character and "magnificent" intellectual and physical talents; of the "discretion, perseverance, and energy with which he has fulfilled every task … and … shown himself equal to every situation"; of his "valuable contribution to anthropological science by making use of the scientific materials available to him"; of his "absolute ideological firmness" and "faultless conduct [as] an SS officer" ; and of such personal qualities as "free, unrestrained, persuasive, and lively" discourse that rendered him "especially dear to his comrades." (from "Beurteilung des SS Hauptsturmführers (R) Dr. Josef Mengele," 19 August 1949 (Berlin Document Center: Mengele).

Thus, the 'kind,' 'decent' Wirths (as some inmates described him) became adept at combining bureaucratic skill and passionate Nazi ideology with a quality of correctness that allowed him to protect 'useful' inmates while ensuring that his organizational loyalty to the SS was always irreproachable. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz between 1940 and December 1943 is said to have held Wirths in particularly high regard. He is said to have remarked of Wirths that "During my 10 years of service in concentration-camp affairs, I have never encountered a better one." (Lifton: p. 386)

Prisoner experimentation

Wirths was involved in ordering arbitrary and pseudo-scientific medical experimentation, particularly in gynecological and typhus-related experimental tests that directly led to prisoner fatalities. Wirths’s primary research concerned pre-cancerous growths of the cervix
Cervix
The cervix is the lower, narrow portion of the uterus where it joins with the top end of the vagina. It is cylindrical or conical in shape and protrudes through the upper anterior vaginal wall...

. Dr. Wirths was also interested in the sterilization of women, by removing their ovaries through surgery or radiation. It is generally acknowledged that he himself never directly participated in such experiments but delegated their conduct to subordinates. Dr. E.W.J. Pearce, an Associate Professor of Obstetrics
Obstetrics
Obstetrics is the medical specialty dealing with the care of all women's reproductive tracts and their children during pregnancy , childbirth and the postnatal period...

 and Gynecology at the Truman Medical Center has made the following observation regarding Wirths' medical experiments: ". . . Wirths, without consent, photographed the cervices of women prisoners, then amputated the pictured cervices, and sent both photographs and specimens for study to Dr. Hinselmann of Berlin. Hinselmann was the physician who developed colposcopy
Colposcopy
Colposcopy is a medical diagnostic procedure to examine an illuminated, magnified view of the cervix and the tissues of the vagina and vulva. Many premalignant lesions and malignant lesions in these areas have discernible characteristics which can be detected through the examination...

. Dr. Wirths' intent was "scientific study" regardless of the presence or absence of cervical lesions in the studied population. His behavior was legal under the Nazi system, as the women prisoners were considered test animals, but is now considered highly unethical.

Selection of prisoners

Importantly, Wirths also asserted medical control of selections at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, which, prior to spring 1943, had been conducted by the camp commander and his subordinates. Wirths insisted upon taking his own personal turn in performing selections, which he could have deferred to physician subordinates if he had so desired. Despite his role as "organizer-in-chief" of selections, Wirths was known to have viewed all deaths at Auschwitz as "natural" deaths, not as the products of direct killing or the gas chambers (see Lifton p. 392). Witness testimony given at the Trial of Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...

 provided a useful insight into how the SS approached the issue of how to record the deaths of Auschwitz prisoners (this did not include those who had been immediately selected for gassing- their admission was simply not recorded in the death registers). Those who died while imprisoned at Auschwitz were always recorded as having died from natural causes and never from being executed or murdered- see The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Session 70 (Part 2 of 6).

Eduard Wirths was promoted to SS Sturmbannführer
Sturmbannführer
Sturmbannführer was a paramilitary rank of the Nazi Party equivalent to major, used both in the Sturmabteilung and the Schutzstaffel...

 (major) in September 1944.

Capture and suicide

Wirths was captured by the allies at the end of the war and held in custody by British forces. Later, on 20 September 1945, knowing that he would surely face trial for numerous war crime
War crime
War crimes are serious violations of the laws applicable in armed conflict giving rise to individual criminal responsibility...

s, Wirths committed suicide by hanging
Hanging
Hanging is the lethal suspension of a person by a ligature. The Oxford English Dictionary states that hanging in this sense is "specifically to put to death by suspension by the neck", though it formerly also referred to crucifixion and death by impalement in which the body would remain...

.

Summary of criminal career

Robert Jay Lifton has noted that ". . . Wirths was significantly immersed in Nazi ideology in three crucial spheres: the claim of revitalizing the German race and Volk; the biomedical path to that revitalization via purification of genes and race; and the focus on the Jews as a threat to this renewal, to the immediate and long-term "health" of the Germanic race. While Wirths did not absolutize these convictions in the manner of a Mengele — they were in him combined with a strong current of medical humanism — his commitment to the Nazi cause was probably no less strong . . . (p. 412)".

Perhaps illustrative of Wirths' commitment to medical 'leadership' was his tendency while at Auschwitz to drive about in a car flying a Red Cross flag as well as his enthusiasm for acting as a marriage counselor and personal adviser to other SS personnel. According to Helgard Kramer, Wirths ". . . first seized on a career as a military doctor and officer in the German elite troops of the SS, because he desperately wanted to become a member of the upper class; eventually to provide his future wife with a "decent marriage." To reach that goal he had to become a 'tough man'. . .".

See also

  • The Holocaust
    The Holocaust
    The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...

  • Nazi human experimentation
    Nazi human experimentation
    Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners by the Nazi German regime in its concentration camps mainly in the early 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust. Prisoners were coerced into participating: they did not willingly volunteer and there...

  • Josef Mengele
    Josef Mengele
    Josef Rudolf Mengele , also known as the Angel of Death was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University...

  • Hans Münch
    Hans Münch
    Hans-Wilhelm Münch was a German citizen and Nazi Party member who, during World War II, worked as a SS physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi occupied Poland from 1943 to 1945. He was the only person acquitted of war crimes at the 1947 Auschwitz trials in Kraków...

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