War Crimes Trial of Andersonville's H. Wirtz (Civil War True Crime)

On a cold November morning in 1865, just months after the Civil War’s end, a Confederate officer stood on the gallows in Washington, D.C. His name was Henry Wirz, the former commandant of the notorious Andersonville prison camp, a place of such suffering that it shocked even a war-weary nation. By the time the rope snapped his neck, over 13,000 Union prisoners had died under his watch, and the war’s first war crimes trial had delivered its judgment.

But was Wirz a sadistic killer, or a scapegoat for a shattered Confederacy? This episode revisits one of the most chilling and consequential stories of the Civil War, tracing Wirz’s life from Swiss immigrant to Confederate warden, and exploring the horrific conditions at Andersonville: starvation, disease, torture, and death on an industrial scale.

We explore the murky line between duty and cruelty, the drama of Wirz’s military tribunal, and the legal, moral, and political legacy of his controversial execution. It’s a story of justice, vengeance, and the high cost of moral reckoning after a war that tore a nation apart.

 

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