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Press Information published by the International Auschwitz Committee

09.03.2021

Mengele’s boss honoured on memorial in his home town

 
 
Eduard Wirths (c.) with the two Auschwitz camp commanders Richard Baer (l.) and Rudolf Höss (r.) at the opening of the SS hospital in Auschwitz. Picture rights: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Eduard Wirths (c.) with the two Auschwitz camp commanders Richard Baer (l.) and Rudolf Höss (r.) at the opening of the SS hospital in Auschwitz. Picture rights: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

 

 

 

“In memory of our fallen and missing brothers”. This is the inscription on the war memorial in the town of Geroldshausen, Lower Franconia. The list of names includes Eduard Wirths, who was born in the town and from 1942 to 1944 was chief SS doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. As such he played a decisive role in the industrialized murder programme at the killing centre.

He was the superior of the infamous concentration camp doctor Mengele. Wirths was neither one of the ‘fallen’, nor was he among the ‘missing’. Having been captured, and knowing that he would be handed over to Poland as a war criminal, he committed suicide in September 1945 at the British internment camp Staumühle. Numerous Nazi war criminals were being held there at that time. Eduard Wirths, who volunteered for the SS in 1934, later sent thousands of Jewish women, children and men to the gas chamber from the ramp in Birkenau, or ordered his subordinate doctors to do this. As a co-organizer of Auschwitz he was, and remains, jointly responsible for the genocide committed there.


For Auschwitz survivors, honouring the name of this person on the memorial in his home town is not only a historical lie that horrifies and angers them. It is also a sad testimony to the fact that people in certain places in Germany are still having difficulty coming to terms in all honesty and dignity with the murderous past of their own communities and with the suffering of the victims.

 
 
 

For further Information

Christoph Heubner

Executive Vice President
International Auschwitz Committee
Phone ++ 49 (0)30 26 39 26 81