page_title: Christian Wirth
section_title: Aktion T4
hierarchical_section_title: Christian Wirth / Aktion T4
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Gedenktafel, Christian Wirth, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, Berlin-Tiergarten, Deutschland English: Memorial plaque, Christian Wirth, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, Berlin-Tiergarten, Germany
context_page_description: Christian Wirth was a German SS officer and Holocaust prepetrator who was one of the leading architects of the program to exterminate the Jewish people of Poland, known as Operation Reinhard. His nicknames included Christian the Terrible and The Wild Christian.
  Wirth worked at scaling up the Action T4 program, in which people with disabilities were murdered by gassing or lethal injection, and then at scaling up Operation Reinhard, by developing extermination camps for the purpose of mass murder. Wirth served as Inspector of all Operation Reinhard camps. He was the first Commandant of Bełżec extermination camp. He was later killed by Yugoslav partisans in Hrpelje-Kozina near Trieste.
context_section_description: At the end of 1939, Wirth, along with other Kripo police officers, was detached from the police for service with the Action T4 euthanasia program.  These police officers served as nonmedical supervisors at the killing centers of the euthanasia program, and Wirth was chief among them.  At the age of fifty-five, Wirth was among the oldest personnel involved in T-4. Wirth first set up office procedures at the "euthanasia" center at Grafeneck Castle in Württemberg.  Shortly thereafter Wirth was transferred to administrative director of the euthanasia institution at Brandenburg an der Havel in Prussia (the medical director was Dr. Irmfried Eberl).
  In December 1939 or January 1940, Wirth was present when twenty to thirty German mental patients were subjected to the first known gassing experiment using carbon monoxide. At Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre, the idea to disguise the gas chambers as shower rooms was introduced.  Wirth continued to participate as a troubleshooter in the T-4 killing centers. For instance, when at Brandenburg a group of suspecting mental patients refused to enter the (disguised) gas chamber, Wirth coaxed them into the room by telling them that they had to enter it in order to receive clothing. But Wirth's most intimate connection with T-4 was at Hartheim, where he was chief of the office staff and director of personnel.  At Hartheim, Wirth oversaw paperwork as head of the registry office, directed the killing process as the individual responsible for security, and commanded the junior staff as director of personnel. Wirth was coarse and brutal, feared by his subordinates and known to use any means necessary to ensure a smooth killing operation. When four female patients at Hartheim were suspected of having contracted typhus, Wirth shot them to prevent the spread of disease to the staff.
  Wirth's responsibility for killing Jews began in September 1940, when handicapped Jews were first gassed at Brandenburg. In mid-1940, Wirth was appointed as an inspector of a dozen euthanasia institutions in the Third Reich.  He frequented Hartheim Euthanasia Centre, where Franz Stangl worked.  Stangl, who was later the commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps, described Wirth in a 1971 interview:
  Wirth was a gross and florid man. My heart sank when I met him. He stayed at Hartheim for several days that time and often came back.  Whenever he was there he addressed us daily at lunch. And here it was again this awful verbal crudity: when he spoke about the necessity of this euthanasia operation, he was not speaking in humane or scientific terms, the way Dr. Werner at T-4 had described it to me. He laughed. He spoke of 'doing away with useless mouths', and that 'sentimental slobber' about such people made him 'puke'.
  In mid-1941, Wirth was involved in the euthanasia program in western areas of Poland; his activity during this time is obscure.  In August 1941 Wirth was transferred out of T-4.  He was appointed to be Commandant of the newly built Chełmno extermination camp.  In September, Wirth was sent to Chełmno to start gassing Jews and Gypsies there. By late March 1942, gassing of Jews and Gypsies was conducted daily in gas vans at Chełmno.
caption: Memorial plaque, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1 in Berlin-Tiergarten, Germany
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