Physician and army officer, born in Switzerland. A Louisiana physician, he was wounded at Fair Oaks and Seven Pines (May 1862). After some time in Europe as a Confederate agent, he became superintendent of Andersonville prison in South Carolina (Jan 1864), which became notorious for its appalling conditions and high death rate. He was later convicted of conspiring to murder prisoners and hanged in November 1865 - the only person executed after the Civil War for war crimes.
Henry Wirz (November 1822 – November 10, 1865) was the only Confederate soldier executed in the aftermath of the American Civil War for war crimes.
Civil War
When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Wirz enlisted in the Confederate States Army as a private in the 4th Louisiana Infantry. He served on detached duty as a prison guard in Alabama before being transferred to help guard Federal prisoners incarcerated at Richmond, Virginia.
In February 1864, the Confederate government established a large military prison, Camp Sumter, near the small railroad depot of Andersonville, Georgia, to house Union prisoners of war.
Trial and execution
After the end of hostilities, Wirz was arrested by a contingent of federal cavalry and taken by rail to Washington, D.C., where the federal government intended to place him on trial for conspiring to impair the lives of Union prisoners of war. James Madison Page, an ex-prisoner of Andersonville wrote a book in the defense of Henry Wirz and to reveal the hypocrisy of the trial in which most called for testimony recollected things which they could not have seen. After a disturbingly short "trial", the commission announced that it had found Wirz guilty of conspiracy as charged and of eleven of thirteen counts of murder.
The Union needed to paint the Confederates as inhuman monsters so that it would be easier to impose war debt upon the Confederates as one of the stipulations of returning to the Union(which they were given no choice but to do). According to the first hand accounts of a truthful ex-prisoner Henry Wirz was not only innocent but deserved praise for his attempts to nourish both guards and prisoners with a food supply almost completely destroyed by the "Scorched Earth" policy of the Union. It is also said that Henry Wirz sent missives to Abraham Lincoln, first asking for food and medicine to be sent for the prisoners and then later offering to release the prisoners outright if someone would be sent to collect them. Abraham Lincoln had no response, he needed Andersonville to be a hell on earth to both continually justify fighting the war caused by his election and decision to entice the confederates to attack a Union ship as well as an excuse to excise war dead from the Confederates without opposition.
In a letter to President Andrew Johnson, Wirz asked for a pardon and maintained his innocence, but the letter went unanswered. Mounting the scaffold on the morning of November 10, 1865, Wirz asserted that he was being hanged for following orders.
Legacy
Wirz's trial was legally significant for two reasons. Firstly, Wirz was one of only two men tried and executed for war crimes during the Civil War. More significantly, however, Wirz's trial was the first war crimes trial in modern history and served as a direct historical precedent for the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after World War II. Scott, featuring Richard Basehart as Wirz and William Shatner as chief government prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel N.P. The film centered upon the question of whether Wirz should have been condemned for following orders, in a parallel with the then-current controversy over the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War.
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