Though he shares a family name with a Confederate officer hanged for war crimes, Heinrich L. Wirz, 86, did not grow up among Confederate enthusiasts. He was born in Bern, Switzerland — not far from the postcard-ready Münster cathedral, begun in 1461, centuries before Fort Sumter, let alone Appomattox.
Wp Get the full experience.Choose your plan ArrowRight
Wirz first heard of the American Civil War in a high school history lesson in the decade after neighboring Germany was crushed by the Allies. When he told his father, a professor of military history at the University of Bern, about the class, his father told him about his great-grand uncle and even showed Wirz a photograph of the Confederate soldier’s hanging.
“I told this to the teacher and to my classmates,” he said. “Of course, they were very excited about my special ancestor, and this was the beginning of my research.”
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
His Swiss American ancestor, it turns out, presided over a Confederate prison that became the “deadliest landscape of the Civil War,” according to the National Park Service. Confederate Capt. Hartmann Heinrich “Henry” Wirz was executed in 1865 after almost 13,000 Union prisoners died due mostly to disease and unsanitary conditions at Georgia’s Andersonville prison, which he ran for a year before the war ended.
He now lies in a cemetery in Northeast D.C., under a marker identifying him as a “Confederate hero martyr,” and his great-grand nephew is battling from neutral territory for the legacy of an officer who “tried to do his duty.”
“I would like to lose the reputation in historical circles of being a descendant of the biggest war criminal of the United States,” he said. “And I would like to get away the stain of the name of our family.”
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Even before he was put in charge of Andersonville, Capt. Wirz was trying to outrun a bad reputation. Born in Switzerland in 1822, he served a prison term for failure to pay debts before emigrating to the United States.
Once here, according to the National Park Service website, he worked as a homeopathic physician and ran a plantation with hundreds of enslaved people before enlisting in the Louisiana infantry once the Civil War began. After working in a number of Confederate prisons, he was put in charge of Andersonville in 1864.
For more than 150 years, historians as well as Union and Confederate sympathizers have debated how responsible Capt. Wirz was for the catastrophe at Andersonville, where he took charge of the newly established prison in 1864.
Counties with more Confederate monuments also had more lynchings, study finds
Jody Mays, Andersonville’s former chief of interpretation and resource management, said about 13,000 prisoners are buried on the grounds of what is now the Andersonville National Historic Site. Capt. Wirz was known for his brutality, according to some accounts: After a prisoner he had shackled during a rainstorm appeared to be suffocating in mud, Capt. Wirz reportedly said: “Let the d‐‐‐ed Yankee drown.”
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Unlike other Confederate commanders who escaped punishment, Capt. Wirz was found guilty of murder and conspiracy. Though documents show he attempted to ameliorate Andersonville’s food shortages, he was hanged on Nov. 10, 1865, after failing to convince a military tribunal that he was just following orders.
The National Park Service, Mays said, tries to tread a middle path between Capt. Wirz’s detractors and defenders.
“There’s dark chapters in the full, complicated history of the United States,” Mays said. “We present facts as we find them, … not take sides one way or another.”
In the decades that followed, however, many took sides.
Capt. Wirz’s prosecutor said his “work of death seems to ... exhibit him rather as a demon than a man.” Indeed, Capt. Wirz became known as the “Demon of Andersonville.”
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
Gary Solis, a retired Marine Corps judge advocate who has taught the law of war at West Point and the Georgetown University Law Center, largely agreed with this view.
“He’s a bad guy, he was guilty and he was a war criminal,” Solis said in an interview. “He deserved everything he got and more.”
Solis said he reviewed the record of Wirz’s trial, where more than 100 witnesses testified: Wirz killed prisoners at Andersonville in grotesque ways — by holding them in stocks or by turning dogs loose on them. He also ordered prisoners to be executed or killed them himself. By comparison, the death toll at a Confederate prison at Salisbury, N.C., that faced similar food shortages was lower, Solis said, and its commander was acquitted of war crimes.
Story continues below advertisement
Solis rejected the idea that Wirz’s conviction meant that the system was rigged against him.
Advertisement
“It’s not true that he was an innocent bystander,” Solis said. “It’s not true he was a victim of his circumstances ... It’s not as if he was on his own — by himself — guilty, but he definitely was guilty.”
Others claim Capt. Wirz was a scapegoat, including James Gaston, the former camp commander of A.H. Stephens Camp 78, based in Americus, Ga., and run by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that praises the Confederacy. Gaston, who has participated in annual memorial services for Capt. Wirz at Andersonville held since 1976, said Capt. Wirz had faced “one of the most unfair trials in the United States.”
Story continues below advertisement
“Things were bad in Andersonville,” he said in a telephone interview. “We realize that. But it was terrible for a lot of prisoners up north.”
After Capt. Wirz’s execution, his body was dismembered and put on display in the North, Gaston said. Indeed, bones from his arm remain on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Md.
“You can’t change history,” Gaston said.
Advertisement
Florida attorney David McCallister said he submitted a request to pardon Capt. Wirz to President Donald Trump’s administration after the 2020 election. Trump had pardoned other historic figures like suffragist Susan B. Anthony and boxer Jack Johnson — he should do the same for Capt. Wirz in the name of “Christian forgiveness,” McCallister said.
Story continues below advertisement
He “got a death penalty we wouldn’t give a mad dog right now,” McCallister said. “It’s past time to correct a historical wrong and give peace to the family.”
The Department of Justice, which handles pardon requests, did not respond to requests for comment about the status of a pardon. McCallister said he planned to resubmit the pardon request — which includes information from Gaston and Wirz — to the Biden administration.
Heinrich Wirz regards these controversies philosophically from abroad. He did not launch the effort to secure a pardon for his ancestor, but provided documentation that might support it — even though he fears those pushing for a pardon missed their chance in the 1970s, when citizenship was restored to Gen. Robert E. Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
“I regret his destiny,” Wirz said of his ancestor. “I can only repeat that all the sources, the historical works, the tenor, the main message, is ‘scapegoat,’ ‘kangaroo court’ and so on. I can but repeat this and try to be as objective as possible.”
In the study of Wirz’s stately home nestled among embassies in Bern, a framed photograph of Capt. Wirz in Confederate uniform rests on a side table next to a miniature representation of the obelisk memorializing him in Andersonville. A flag stand beside Wirz’s desk includes the first flag of the Confederacy. Mounted on a wall is an autographed picture of Gen. Colin Powell and a certificate of acceptance into the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, a society for descendants of Confederate officers and political leaders, as well as other certificates from organizations linked to the Confederate army.
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
In 1964, on the first of several trips to the United States, Wirz traveled to the site where Capt. Wirz was executed almost a century before.
“I think he was a real representative of our country and our family,” Wirz said of his ancestor. The Wirz family in Switzerland has a strong military tradition, he said, he himself having retired from the Swiss Army as a colonel. “He tried to do his duty, even taking the consequences.”
Benjamin Cloyd — an administrator at Mississippi Delta Community College in Moorhead, Miss., and author of “Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory” — said he met Heinrich Wirz at Andersonville.
Cloyd called the debate about Civil War prisons an “endless loop.” After growing up in Ohio and moving south for graduate school, Cloyd said he wanted to show how both the North and South used poor conditions in the other side’s prison camps for propaganda even as the South was clearly in the wrong.
Advertisement
“Periodically, Henry Wirz gets looked at: Is he guilty or not?” Cloyd said. “To me, that answer is as simple as: Who is looking at it, and what are they trying to say?”
Are cemeteries the right place to put Confederate statues and memorials?
For now, Heinrich Wirz is hoping to complete a biography of his ancestor, a story that begins with Capt. Henry Wirz’s roots in Switzerland and ends with the ongoing debate over his legacy.
“This will be my heritage,” Wirz said. “Then my descendants will see what will happen.”
Thousands of miles away, hidden among countless other tombstones, Capt. Wirz’s modest grave at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Northeast Washington — equidistant from the resting place of Mary Surratt, hanged for her role in Lincoln’s assassination, and the Bladensburg Road Denny’s restaurant — bears few hallmarks of the heated battle over his legacy.
Someone had recently left a wreath at Surratt’s grave. Capt. Wirz’s was bare.
Giroud reported from Bern, Switzerland.