SS Commander and World War II War-Criminal. He was a leading perpetrator of the Holocaust and played a direct role in the murders of over 2 million Jews. Wirth was born in Oberbalzheim, Germany. He was a construction worker before serving in the German Army during World War I. After the war he joined the Stuttgart Police and rose to the rank of Chief of the Homicide Division, largely through his success in beating confessions out of suspects. He became a member of the Nazi Party in 1931, the SA (Brownshirts) in 1933, and a Major in the SS in 1939, with the special classification "Z. Fuhrer" ("at the Fuhrer's disposal"). That year he was put in charge of the Nazis' T-4 Euthanasia Program, which was designed to rid the German population of the physically and mentally disabled. He advocated poison gas over shooting as the most efficient means of execution, and conducted his first large-scale gassing of handicapped prisoners at Brandenburg in 1940. On this occasion he realized that to minimize panic and possible escape attempts, his victims had to be lulled into a false sense of security; an associate then suggested disguising the gas chambers as shower rooms. As a top aide to Senior SS Leader Odilo Globocnik, Wirth was involved in Operation Reinhard, part of Hitler's plan to destroy the Jews of Europe, from its earliest stages. In December 1941 he was ordered to set up the first Nazi killing center, Belzec, near Lublin in Poland, and appointed its commander. There he established methods of mass slaughter that were later adapted by Auschwitz and other death camps. Belzec was built to resemble a transit camp and Wirth himself greeted new arrivals with a jovial speech intended to put them at ease; the condemned were kept in the dark about their fate almost to the bitter end. Nicknamed "Stuka" (a dive bomber) and "The Savage" by his own men, Wirth was feared for his brutality and ruthlessness. He liked to carry a riding crop, which he used to beat prisoners and subordinates alike. At Belzec he personally supervised each phase of the killing and in the words of one SS officer, literally "walked over the bodies." The genocide reached a fever pitch after December 1942, when Wirth was named field supervisor of all of the Operation Reinhard camps, including Sobibor and Treblinka. To eliminate witnesses he also directed the "Harvest Festival" Massacre of 42,000 Jewish laborers in Lublin on November 3, 1943. By this time the focus of Hitler's Final Solution had shifted to Auschwitz; Operation Reinhard was shut down and its killing centers demolished. Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, Wirth was sent to Trieste in northern Italy with the dual tasks of setting up a new death camp at San Sabba and hunting down the Allied underground in the region. On May 26, 1944, while travelling to Fiume in an open car, he was killed in an ambush by Yugoslav partisans. He was buried with honors, something he denied his countless victims, in the village of Opicina. In 1959 his remains were reinterred at the German Military Cemetery in Costermano, where his presence continues to generate controversy. Former SS Sergeant Franz Suchomel, who served under Wirth at Treblinka and Trieste, said in an interview many years later: "If only someone had had the courage to kill Christian Wirth - Operation Reinhard would have collapsed. Berlin would not have found another man with such energy for evil and nastiness."