Eduard Wirths

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.

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 Dr. 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)

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. . .".

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.

In British custody, Wirths committed suicide by hanging after a British officer shook hands with him saying: "Now I have shook hands with the man who killed four million people". Wirths died on 20 September 1945.

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'. . .".