Wirz, Henry b. November 25, 1823 (?); Zurich, Switzerland d. November 10, 1865;Washington, D.C.
Henry Wirz was a German-speaking Swiss immigrant to America who fought for the Confederacy and was executed by the Union for his command of the Andersonville prison camp. Details of Wirz’s life remain disputed but common accounts list that Wirz immigrated to the United States in 1849, married, and began medical practice first in Kentucky and then in Louisiana.
After the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, Wirz joined the enlisted ranks of Company A, Fourth Battalion of the Louisiana Volunteers and crippled his right arm during his service (perhaps in the 1862 Battle of Seven Pines). Promoted to captain for bravery, Wirz served as acting adjutant general to the provost marshal of Confederate prison camps, General John H. Winder, and then reputedly as a secret courier to Confederate diplomatic missions in England and France. He returned to Richmond in January 1864, commanded Andersonville prison camp from April 1864 to the end of war in April 1865, and received a promotion to major before his decommission. The then-civilian Wirz was arrested by Union military forces, questioned, released, rearrested, sent to Washington for war crimes trial relating to his treatment of prisoners at the Andersonville camp, and executed for “murder in violation of the laws and customs of war.”The Wirz case sparked controversy from its inception, and the controversy remains unsettled. Postexecution defenders of Wirz included his lawyer Louis Schade and even a Union prisoner of Wirz, Lieutenant James Madison Page of the 6th Michigan Cavalry. Critics of the Wirz trial argued a litany of both procedural and substantive improprieties: for example, that it began as an abortive political ploy to implicate Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and others in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; that it lacked jurisdiction for a U.S. military court because Wirz never served in the U.S.
military; that it violated the terms of the surrender; that none of the alleged thirteen murder victims were named; that the prosecutor, Judge Advocate Colonel Norton P. Chipman (founder of the Grand Army of the Republic and Memorial Day, and author of a 1911 account of the Wirz trial), denied the ability of the defense to call witnesses based on his screening interviews of witnesses for relevance; that prosecution witnesses committed perjuries known prior to execution; that Wirz was a scapegoat for factors beyond his control, such as systemic Confederate food shortages, local epidemics that also ravaged nonprisoners in the same area, and overcrowding well beyond the design limits of the facilities; or that Union prison commanders should or would be open to similar prosecutions. Some points incited political controversy because they suggested Union responsibility. For instance, the starvation of Union prisoners might be traced to the Union blockade of the South because Confederate soldiers suffered more meager rations than their enemy and the Confederacy’s prisoners did not eat better than its soldiers. Also, critics blamed the overcrowding on the controversial 1863 Union decision to end prisoner exchanges (an issue declared inadmissible by the Wirz tribunal). As Union general Ulysses S. Grant grimly noted, because the Confederacy endured a greater manpower shortage than the Union, prisoner exchange provided a relative military advantage to the Confederacy—so a Union soldier performed military service by risking his life in squalid prison camps just as he would risk his life in battle.Wirz constituted part of the German contribution of roughly 200,000 soldiers, including nine brigadier generals and four major generals, to both sides of the U.S. Civil War. As the only official postwar execution of a Confederate (when in world history mass execution of rebels was not unprecedented), he also represents the U.S. habit of constructive rather than vengeful Carthaginian peace for its vanquished foes. On the other hand, as the only enemy officially executed for war crimes by the United States until after World War II, Wirz’s 1865 trial and execution became a template for the 1945 Nuremburg trials and executions of twentieth-century Germans. Finally, his case illustrates that the attempt to apply the rule of law to war ironically risks the imposition of one-sided “victor’s justice.”
John W Walko
See also American Civil War, German Participants in; Nuremberg Trials
References and Further Reading
Genoways, Ted, and Hugh H. Genoways, eds. A Perfect Picture of Hell: Eyewitness Accounts by Civil War Prisoners from the 12th Iowa. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2001.
Horigan, Michael. Elmira: Death Camp of the North. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2002.
Page, James Madison, and M. J. Haley. The True Story of Andersonville Prison: A Defense of Major Henry Wirz. Scituate, MA: Digital Scanning, 2000.