Worse Than Mengele? His Supervisor at Auschwitz: SS Doctor Wirths JJ
27 January 1945. The Red Army enters Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination centres located in German-occupied Poland. It is estimated that a minimum of 1.3 million people were deported to this camp between 1940 and 1945, and of these, at least 1.1 million were murdered. The Soviet soldiers encounter thousands of surviving prisoners.
Many are starving, gravely ill, and suffering from diseases that have spread through the overcrowded camp. They also discover evidence of medical experiments conducted on men, women, and children by SS doctors who view human beings as little more than test subjects. For years, Auschwitz served as a place where selections determined who would live and who would die.
Newly arrived prisoners were sent either to forced labour or directly to the gas chambers, while others were handed over to SS doctors. Overseeing this vast medical system was the highest-ranking SS doctor at Auschwitz, a man who supervised camp physicians, organized selections, and bore responsibility for the crimes committed by the medical staff under his command. His name is Eduard Wirths.
Eduard Egid Wirths was born on 4 September 1909 in the village of Geroldshausen near the Bavarian city of Würzburg, then part of the German Empire. He grew up in a Catholic family whose political views leaned toward social democracy rather than radical nationalism. Wirths’s father had served as a medical corpsman during the First World War, which lasted from July 1914 to November 1918.
Deeply affected by his wartime experiences, he encouraged his sons to pursue careers in medicine and Eduard followed that path from an early age. Wirths had several siblings, including his younger brother Helmut, who would later become a gynaecologist. The brothers remained close throughout their lives. Within the family, Eduard developed a reputation for being disciplined, conscientious, and dependable.
He was known as a quiet and serious young man who avoided smoking and drinking and generally treated others with kindness and respect. Nothing in his upbringing suggested that he would one day become associated with one of the most infamous concentration camps in history. The Wirths family was not known for antisemitism, nor was it associated with extremist nationalist politics.
In 1930, Wirths began studying medicine at the University of Würzburg. He completed his studies five years later and subsequently earned a doctorate in medicine. On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. In June of the same year, Wirths joined the Nazi Party and the SA, or Sturmabteilung, the Nazi paramilitary organization commonly known as the Brownshirts because of the colour of their uniforms. The following year, in October 1934, he left the SA and transferred to the SS, the
elite organization that would become one of the main instruments of Nazi terror and persecution. In 1936, Wirths married a fellow medical student, Gertrud Petavy, and the marriage produced four children. The Second World War started on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. After the outbreak of the war, Wirths joined the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS.
In the following months, he served as a military physician and saw action in Norway and later on the Eastern Front during Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on 22 June 1941. His military career came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1942 when a heart condition rendered him unfit for frontline service.
Wirths was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, but instead of returning to civilian medicine, he was assigned to the concentration camp system. After serving briefly at Dachau near Munich and later as chief physician at Neuengamme outside Hamburg, he received a far more significant appointment. In September 1942, Wirths was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer, equivalent to the rank of captain in the U.S.
Army, and became the senior SS physician at Auschwitz, where all camp doctors, including Josef Mengele, Horst Fischer, and Horst Schumann, fell under his authority. Wirths quickly became one of the key figures in the administration of Auschwitz. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz camp complex, reportedly held him in particularly high regard.
Reflecting on Wirths’s performance, Höss later stated: “During my ten years of service in concentration-camp affairs, I have never encountered a better one.” As medical director, Wirths participated in the system of selections that determined the fate of countless prisoners. Newly arrived deportees were examined upon arrival, and camp doctors decided who appeared fit enough for forced labour and who would be sent directly to the gas chambers.
Wirths assigned physicians to these selections and also took part in them personally. He was likewise involved in the murder of elderly, sick, and weakened prisoners under Nazi policies that regarded those unable to work as expendable. Beyond the selections, Wirths also became deeply involved in the medical experiments conducted at Auschwitz.
He was responsible for selecting prisoners who would be used in experiments and supervised doctors who carried out research on inmates. Much of this work took place in Block 10, where imprisoned Jewish women were subjected to painful gynaecological procedures. Wirths himself became involved in research aimed at the early detection of cervical cancer. Women were examined, photographed, and operated on without their consent.
Tissue samples were removed and sent to specialists in Germany for further study. Wirths also showed an interest in sterilization research; a subject closely connected to Nazi racial policies. Under his authority, prisoner doctors including French physician Adélaïde Hautval and Jewish doctor Maximilian Samuel were compelled to assist in experiments on women.
In another case, Wirths deliberately ordered four Jewish prisoners to be infected with typhus in order to test a vaccine serum. Two of the victims died as a result. Among the doctors who served under Wirths was Josef Mengele, nicknamed the “Angel of Death”, a physician whose name would later become synonymous with the horrors of Auschwitz. Rather than objecting to Mengele’s activities, Wirths held him in exceptionally high regard.
In a recommendation for promotion written in August 1944, he described Mengele as open, honest, firm, and absolutely dependable. He praised his intelligence, energy, perseverance, and dedication to duty.
Wirths further commended what he called Mengele’s valuable contribution to anthropological science through the use of “scientific material” available to him at Auschwitz. He also praised Mengele’s ideological commitment and described him as an exemplary SS officer. On the other hand, unlike many other SS doctors, Wirths took measures that improved conditions inside parts of the camp.
He worked to reduce the spread of typhus and typhoid fever and introduced improvements to hygiene in prisoner hospitals. These measures contributed to a significant decline in mortality from disease. He also prohibited SS medical orderlies from carrying out unauthorized phenol injections against seriously ill prisoners. Previously, some inmates had been murdered by injections directly into the heart without any formal procedure. Wirths ordered that such actions follow official channels instead.
He occasionally used his authority to prevent individual prisoners from being condemned and employed capable prisoner doctors in medical positions. Some inmates later recalled that he attempted to prevent certain abuses when it was within his power to do so. One of the prisoners who came to know him best was Hermann Langbein, an Austrian political prisoner who worked as Wirths’s clerk. Over time, the two developed an unusual relationship.
Langbein, who was secretly involved in the Auschwitz resistance movement, gradually gained Wirths’s trust. Through intermediaries, the resistance even conveyed to Wirths that the Allies considered him responsible for crimes committed at Auschwitz but had refrained from targeting his family. This gave the resistance a degree of influence over him.
Yet none of these actions altered Wirths’s fundamental role within the camp. He continued to supervise selections, oversaw doctors involved in human experimentation, and remained responsible for the medical administration of Auschwitz during some of its deadliest years. In September 1944, Wirths was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer, the rank equivalent to a major in the U.S.
Army, and received the War Merit Cross Second Class with Swords. After the evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945, Wirths was transferred to Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in central Germany, where he once again served as chief physician. He later worked at Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme in the north as Nazi Germany moved toward its final collapse.
The Second World War in Europe ended on 8 May 1945 with the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. Following Germany’s defeat, Wirths went into hiding with his brother Helmut in Hamburg. Despite the collapse of the regime he had served, Wirths appeared unwilling to accept responsibility for his actions.
In a letter to his wife dated 24 May 1945, he wrote: “We can answer with the best conscience before our Lord God and before men.” In the same letter, he added: “What crime have I committed? I truly do not know!” In July 1945, Wirths was arrested by British forces and imprisoned in the Neuengamme internment camp.
He was later transferred to the Staumühle internment camp, where he awaited interrogation about his role at Auschwitz. Before questioning began, a British Army officer identified as Colonel Draper reportedly greeted Wirths with a handshake and then delivered a blunt assessment of his responsibility.
Draper told him: “So I have shaken the hand of the man who, as the chief physician of Auschwitz, bears responsibility for the death of four million people. Tomorrow, I will interrogate you about it. Think about your responsibility overnight, look at your hands.” That night, Wirths attempted to take his own life by hanging himself in his cell. Guards discovered him and cut him down while he was still alive.
However, the damage had already been done. Shortly before his death, Wirths left behind a written justification of his conduct. In it, he claimed: “I endeavoured, in accordance with my Christian and medical conscience, to help the sick prisoners”. On 20 September 1945, Eduard Wirths died from the injuries sustained during his suicide attempt. He was 36 years old.
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