Before Christmas 1941, Wirth arrives in Belzec, a little place in the far south-east of occupied Poland, and is made its first camp commander, with the task and ambition of exterminating all the Jews there. They call him Christian the Terrible. Horrible stories circulate about his savagery.
There is not much information available about Belzec. The atrocities committed in Belzec are slipping into oblivion. Belzec is a forgotten camp today. One of the two men who survived Belzec, Rudolf Reder, testifies at a trial of war criminals in May 1945:
Wirth was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his middle forties with a vulgar face. Wirth was a beast.
Kurt Gerstein, an S.S.-Lieutenant, then head of the Technical Disinfection Services of the S.S.-Waffen, testifies:
I arrived in Belzec in late summer 1942. I was supposed to improve gassing methods and implement a way to disinfect clothing. A transport of Jews had just arrived from Lvov and all of them were immediately sent to the gas chamber. Wirth stood on a small platform and hurried the prisoners along with a whip, slashing them across the face.
Chaim Hirszmann also testifies:
Once, when a transport of children arrived in Belzec, Wirth ordered all the children thrown into a huge pit and buried alive.
I am Werner Dubois. At Belzec I drove a truck as an S.S. officer from April 1942 to April 1943 and supervised the work of the gas chambers. Wirth was brutal. He bellowed and threatened all the members of the German garrison and often struck them on the face. Only Oberhauser was not afraid of him.
In August 1942 Odilo Globočnik, leader of Aktion Reinhard, names Wirth as inspector of the S.S.-Sonderkommandos of Aktion Reinhard. Wirth’s first task is to reorganize the Treblinka camp, which, as a result of poor management, is not functioning well. Wirth brings his colleague Franz Stangl from Sobibor and puts him in charge of Treblinka. Globočnik orders a temporary hold on the transports from Warsaw. Treblinka is expanded, the killing methods are perfected, larger gas chambers are built. Lorenz Hackenholt comes over from Sobibor and brings his sketches, drawings and blueprints. Erwin Lambert of the S.S., an expert at building gas chambers, oversees the construction.
In late 1942 Wirth manages the work camps in the Lublin district and moves into a two-storey villa near Lublin military airfield, which was not working at the time. At the airfield Wirth sets up three hangars where all the confiscated property of the victims of Aktion Reinhard is sorted. It is then taken by train to Berlin.
In the summer of 1943 Wirth is promoted to S.S.- Sturmbannfuhrer and, after the Treblinka Revolt of 2 August, 1943, he is transferred to Trieste.
Near Kozina, on 26 May, 1944, on his way from Trieste to Rijeka by car, Wirth is killed by partisans of the 1st Battalion of the Istrian Division, led by Maks Zadnik. Another eleven S.S.-Sonderkommandos, members of Aktion Reinhard and Einsatz R, are killed in combat in northern Italy. All are buried first at the German military cemetery near Villa Opicina, but then between 1957 and 1961 they are exhumed and, with another 21,000 German soldiers, re-interred at the new German military cemetery near Costermano, on the eastern shore of Lake Garda. Although their names have been expunged from the list of war victims and from their headstones, once a year unknown visitors place flowers on their enumerated graves (Wirth’s is 716) and salute them with the Nazi salute. To this very day.
Continually obsessed by the “Jewish Question”, Wirth installs the infrastructure for proceeding with mass killings. He builds an efficient little crematorium. In and around Trieste he puts to use the methods developed in Poland, and sets up a new concentration camp at the San Sabba rice mill, an abandoned complex of buildings, a former rice-husking plant in the Trieste suburbs. An expert at building crematoria, Erwin Lambert, arrives in Trieste and successfully applies the experience he has gained in Poland to the rice mill. The ovens are inaugurated on 4 April, 1944, with a celebratory test run incinerating seventy bodies of hostages killed at the Villa Opicina shooting range the day before. Wirths staff is experienced not only in burning prisoners, but in torturing them to death, beating them brutally, while children are ordered to collect firewood for the ovens in which they, too, will burn.
The German occupation makes Trieste a gift of fourteen legally registered brothels under the medical supervision of Italian doctors, and 200 registered streetwalkers. The registered brothels allow in only members of the military (and their previously screened guests), while the unregistered brothels are left to civilians. In the registered houses of passion, the passions are efficiently controlled. Upon entering the brothel the “consumer” would receive a form (in duplicate) in which a “secretary” would officially enter his name and unit, his rank, the date of the visit, the name of the “institution” and the name of the prostitute, after which the customer would be medically examined to make sure he had no pubic pests or gonorrhea or, heaven forbid, syphilis; then he’d undergo prophylactic treatment consisting of a wash with soap and water and mercury bichloride, followed by an intraurethral injection of 2 per cent protargol and an application of calomel powder. Finally, he would be handed a condom, after which, with an intrepid Heil! off he would go to satisfy his sex drive. But managed prostitution is an activity the S.S.-command does not succeed in implementing successfully across the board, not in Trieste or Ljubljana or Rijeka or Gorizia or Pula or Udine. Pretty girls from decent families are strolling around, well dressed, spirited and free; and hunting for prey is what soldiers are trained to do. So syphilis and gonorrhoea flourish, children are born out of wedlock, and little psychiatric clinics sprout secretly in the suburbs of the cities and towns of the Adriatisches Küstenland, where S.S. men could be treated for their hysteria, and their war and sex traumas.
The Nazi plan for conquering the world is built on secrecy, founded on institutions, confidential documents, dark experiments, obscure war plans, mystical phantasms, occult dreams, hidden factories, camouflaged camps, fake hospitals and cryptic conferences, on dubious industry and esoteric production, vague warfare and ambiguous military campaigns. And at the centre, the axis around which this rotten cosmic vision spreads, ever more like the gigantic cocoon of some freak insect, are sexual organs, the cunt and the cock, their utilitarian and market value, their messianic mission, their battle cry, in other words — fucking, coitus vulgaris, which is designed to create a new man and a new age. The cunt makes a difference, the cock defines the difference. Castration, sterilization, controlled procreation, fornication and prostitution are the most powerful weapons of the Reich, the greatest obsession of the Reich, and, furthermore, of the Church.
Whether this took the form of an inflatable doll or a Salon Kitty or a Lebensborn farm is immaterial. The brothels in 1943 function smoothly for Himmler’s unmarried and married warriors along all fronts, including the Adriatisches Küstenland. To the more than one hundred official houses of ill repute, faced with a shortage of local floozies, vamps and easy women, they bring in puellae publicae, dedicated to the “great cause of mankind": women from Paris, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, even Berlin, some under coercion, some lured by promises, six hundred of them or more to service at least fifty clients a day, while those from the bordello on Klosterstrasse in Stuttgart, for example (and not only they), are put to work for science, using diaphragms in which they collect the semen of their studs for future (secret, of course) experiments.