When talking about war crimes and prison camps, it is usually associated with the Nazis and World War II. However, already in the United States War of Secession (1861-1865) there was someone who was tried and executed for war crimes committed in a prison camp; this someone was the protagonist of our article today.
Henry Wirz was born in Switzerland in 1823 and emigrated to the USA. in 1849, specifically to Louisiana. When conflict broke out between North and South in 1861, Wirz joined the ranks of the Fourth Louisiana Battalion that fought with Confederate forces. Following the first Battle of Bull Run, Wirz was ordered to guard Union Army prisoners and thereafter held a variety of POW-related responsibilities, from custody to transfer or exchange with Confederate Army captives. prisoners in the North. He also traveled to Europe with dispatches to Southern government representatives in Britain and France.
However, it was not until well into the war in February 1864 that the event that ultimately cost him his life and made him famous occurred; on that date he was appointed to lead the Confederate Union Army prison camp near Anderson, Georgia, known as Camp Sumter.
The conditions at Camp Sumter were subhuman:overcrowding, lack of food and drinking water, unsanitary conditions, contagious diseases were our daily bread for the northern prisoners who were crowded there waiting to exchange with southern captives. It is estimated that about 45,000 Union soldiers passed through Camp Sumter, of whom about 13,000 died. In this way, Camp Sumter's fame as a sinister and deadly place spread among the Northern states already during the conflict.
Although Wirz appealed to his superiors on more than one occasion to improve conditions for the camp's prisoners, his requests were rebuffed, compounded by the increasingly desperate situation of the Confederacy as the war progressed.
When the war ended, Wirz was taken prisoner in May 1865 and taken to Washington where it was agreed that he would stand trial by military court. Some of the members of the court had already been part of the one that had tried those accused of having cooperated with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of President Lincoln; Among those who sat on both tribunals was a character who would go down in history as the writer of a successful novel:Lewis Wallace, author of Ben-Hur.
At the trial, some prisoners and relatives of prisoners who passed through Camp Sumter testified. In addition to the denunciation of the conditions in the camp, there were personal accusations of cruelty and the murder of prisoners directed against Wirz.
As a result of all this, and after a trial that lasted two months, the court found Henry Wirz guilty of cruelty and war crimes and sentenced him to death.
The plea for clemency made by the condemned President Andrew Johnson went unanswered and Wirz was hanged on the gallows in front of the Capitol on November 10, 1865.
Subsequent investigations have questioned the veracity of some of the testimony given against Wirz at trial and the general feeling is that the Swiss emigrant was a scapegoat; some theory even holds that he was offered a pardon in exchange for him testifying against Confederate President Jefferson Davis and that he refused to do so.
Be that as it may, Henry Wirz went down in history as one of the three members of the Confederate army convicted of war crimes in a conflict that bled the United States of America for four years.