Dr.
Eduard Wirths (4
September 1909 – 20 September 1945) was the
Chief SS
doctor (SS-Standortarzt) at the Auschwitz
concentration camp
from September 1942 to January 1945. Thus,
Wirths had formal responsibility for everything undertaken by the
nearly 20 SS doctors (including
Josef
Mengele,
Horst Schumann and
Carl Clauberg) who worked in the
medical sections of Auschwitz between 1942-1945.
Early life
Eduard
Wirths was born in Geroldshausen
near Würzburg
, Bavaria
into a
Catholic family with democratic Socialist leanings. His father served as a
medical corpsman in the
First World
War and according to Dr.
Robert
Jay Lifton 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 while
studying medicine at the University of Würzburg
(1930-35). He joined the Nazi
Party and the SA
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 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 (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 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. 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 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. Dr. Wirths' intent was
"scientific study" regardless of the presence or absence of
cervical lesions in the studied population. His atrocious behavior
was legal under the Nazi system, as the women prisoners were
considered test animals, but enormously 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
"organiser-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 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 whilst 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 (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
warcrimes,
Wirths committed suicide by
hanging.
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' deluded and tortured 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 counsellor and personal advisor 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
References
- Eichmann trial - The District Court Sessions at
www.nizkor.org
- Dr. Robert J. Lifton, (1986) THE NAZI DOCTORS:Medical
Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic
Books.
- University of Linz: SS-DOCTOR DR. EDUARD WIRTHS
- Dr. E.W.J. Pearce, (1996) "Antigone: An Exercise in Medical
Ethics" in History and Philosophy of Medicine Newsletter
published by the University of Kansas Medical Centre.[237619]
- Transcript (in German) of the documentary Film (1975) "Dr.
Eduard Wirths – Standortarzt von Auschwitz" by Dutch film makers
Roland Orthel and others. [237620]
Nazi Doctors at www.webster.edu