Unbelievable! See Reason Why Henry Wirz Executed On The November 10, 1865
Before the Civil War, Henry Wirz practices medicine, although he is not officially a doctor. The profession does not have near the present-day educational requirements.
As a Confederate officer, Wirz becomes superintendent of Georgia's Andersonville prison, officially known as Camp Sumter, in 1864. Providing only makeshift shelters, the prison becomes notorious for its appalling conditions. Of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners confined at Andersonville, over 13,000 perish.
On May 7, 1865, four weeks after the end of the Civil War, Wirz is arrested on charges of war crimes for impairing the lives of Union prisoners. A military tribunal convicts him on several counts of violating the "laws of war" in torturing the prisoners in multiple ways including physically beating and starving them and unlawfully confining them in stocks.
Wirz is hanged at Washington, D.C.'s Old Capitol Prison on November 10, 1865. As the order for his execution commences, his neck does not break from the fall, and a crowd of two-hundred spectators guarded by one-hundred-twenty soldiers watches as Wirz writhes in agony.
Wirz is one of only two men executed for war crimes during the Civil War; the other is Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson.
Wirz has become a controversial figure as the consensus about his guilt and culpability of Camp Sumter's horrid conditions and the fairness of his post-war trial is debated. Conditions at Andersonville are horrible, but he has no resources with which to combat them. As the Union forces pushed south, the Confederacy moved prisoners from camps farther north to Andersonville, causing the overcrowding. In addition, the Union had suspended prisoner exchanges in an attempt to bring the war to a quick close. (Doing so would have prevented released rebels from rejoining the CSA army.)
Many historians believe Henry Wirz makes for a convenient scapegoat for the Andersonville atrocities.
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