May 25, 2026

Memorial Day Special - ANDERSONVILLE: THE HENRY WIRZ TRIAL, AMERICA'S FIRST WAR CRIMES CASE & THE 13,000 GRAVES

Show Notes
Transcript

Memorial Day Special — How thirteen thousand Union dead in a Georgia stockade produced the trial that gave Nuremberg its blueprint.

Garret Fisher marks Memorial Day with the first war crimes trial in American history. November 10, 1865 — Confederate Captain Henry Wirz was hanged in Washington for commanding Andersonville prison, where nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died of starvation, disease, and exposure in fourteen months. From the Swiss-immigrant doctor who ran Camp Sumter to the military tribunal that established “just following orders” was no defense — a precedent later cited at Nuremberg. Plus Clara Barton's mission to name 13,000 graves, the Union veterans' order that birthed Memorial Day itself, and the monument the Daughters of the Confederacy built to honor him in 1908 — still standing today.

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Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, I'm Garrett Fisher. This is

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Daily Crime Injustice. Today is Monday, May twenty fifth, twenty

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twenty six. This is a different kind of episode. Today

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is the day we set aside to remember the Americans

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who died wearing the uniform of this country. And on

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this show we usually keep things current, yesterday's verdict, last

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week's testimony, the trial unfolding right now. Today we're going

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back way back eighteen sixty four, eighteen sixty five, because

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the holiday you're observing right now exists in part because

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of a piece of land in southwest Georgia, sixteen and

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a half acres of red clay and pine logs, a

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prison the Confederate Army called Camp Sumter, and that everyone

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in America came to call Andersonville. For fourteen months February

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eighteen sixty four to eight April eighteen sixty five, roughly

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forty five thousand Union soldiers passed through those gates. Nearly

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thirteen thousand of them never came out. They died of starvation,

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of dysentery, of scurvy, of exposure to a Georgia sun

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and a Georgia winter with no real shelter of being

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shot for stepping across a wooden fence nineteen feet inside

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the stockade wall, a line the guards called the deadline, which,

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by the way, is where we got the word. At

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the peak in August eighteen sixty four, more than one

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hundred men were dying inside that camp every single day.

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Walt Whitman saw the survivors when they came home, and

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he wrote, quote, there are deeds crimes that may be forgiven,

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but this is not among them. And when the war ended,

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one man stood trial for it. Captain Henry Wurtz, a

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Swiss immigrant, a doctor, the man who ran the inside

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of that camp. He was tried in Washington, in the

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shadow of the United States Capitol, in the same building

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where the people who conspired to assassinate Abraham Lincoln had

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been judged just a few weeks earlier, one hundred and

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sixty witnesses, two months of testimony, convicted, sentenced to death,

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and on November tenth, eighteen sixty five, hanged in the

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courtyard of the Old Capitol Prison, the only Confederate ever

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executed for war crimes, the first war crimes trial in

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American history. Today, I want to walk you through three things,

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What actually happened inside Andersonville, what happened to Henry Wurtz

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in that courtroom, and how the painstaking work of identifying

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those thirteen thousand graves helped give us the holiday you're

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observing right now. We're also going to talk about why

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the question of whether Vertz was a monster or a

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scapegoat is somehow in twenty twenty six, still a live argument.

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I'm Garrett Fisher. Let me walk you through this. This

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is daily crime injustice. Let's start with the Campets, because

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to understand Verts, you have to understand the place he

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was running. By late eighteen sixty three, the Confederacy had

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a problem. Richmond was overflowing with Union prisoners. The food

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situation was bad, the security situation was worse. So Confederate

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officials picked a spot in southwest Georgia, near a tiny

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railroad depot called Anderson That's where the name comes from,

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and started building. The official name was Camp Sumter, sixteen

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and a half acres at first, walls of pine logs

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fifteen to seventeen feet high. Prisoners started arriving in late

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February eighteen sixty four, before construction was even finished. The

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site was designed for around ten thousand men. At its

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peak in August eighteen sixty four, it held nearly thirty

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three thousand. Inside. There were no barracks, no real shelter.

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The prisoners built what they called shebangs, little lean tws

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out of sticks, rags, scraps of blanket, whatever they could find.

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Men without even that dug holes in the ground. The

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only water source was a creek that ran through the camp,

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and that creek got used for drinking, cooking, washing, and

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as a latrine by tens of thousands of starving men

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all at once. The disease that produced is exactly what

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you'd expect. Dysentery moved through the camp like fire scurvy,

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followed by summer. Men were dying faster than anyone could

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count them. The deadline was a low wooden rail about

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nineteen feet inside the main stockade wall. Officially, it was

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there to keep prisoners from tunneling or rushing the walls.

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In practice, if you stumbled across it, if you were

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sick or disoriented, or just trying to reach a slightly

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cleaner patch of water, the guards in the towers were

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authorized to shoot you on site. They did regularly that's

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where the word deadline in our language comes from. It's

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not a metaphor about a writing assignment or a project

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at work. It's a wooden rail in a Georgia prison

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camp where Union soldiers were shot for getting too close

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to it. Henry Wurtz was put in command of the

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inside of that camp in March eighteen sixty four. Here's

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his background. Born Hartmann, Heinrich Wertz in Zurich, Switzerland. In

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eighteen twenty three, God himself convicted of embezzlement and fraud,

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was exiled from Zurich and came to the United States

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in eighteen forty nine. Worked in a Massachusetts factory for

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a few years, drifted south, picked up a medical practice

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in homeopathy, married a widow in Louisiana, ended up overseeing

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a slave plantation. When the war broke out, he joined

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the fourth Louisiana Battalion. He was wounded. The details of

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how vary by source, and ended up working with prisoners

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of war full time. By the time the Confederacy needed

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an officer to run the inside of camp, Sumter Vertz

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was the one with the prison handling resume and the

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rank to take it was. He handed an impossible job, yes, genuinely.

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By the time the case Samp hit its peak, two

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things had gone catastrophically wrong outside his control. First, the

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prisoner exchange system between North and South had collapsed in

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eighteen sixty four, partly because US Secretary of War Edwin

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Stanton calculated correctly that the Confederacy needed those bodies back

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in the field more than the Union did, so prisoners

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just kept arriving with nowhere to go. Second, Sherman was

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burning his way through Georgia and the single rickety rail

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line that fed Andersonville was being strangled. Wurtz had thirty

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something thousand men to feed and one disintegrating supply chain

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to do it with. But here's the other part. He

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had a documented temper. He carried a pistol, and he

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used it. Defense witnesses at his trial would describe a

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man trying to help. Prosecution witnesses would describe a man

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standing over dying prisoners and screaming at them. He cut rations,

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He oversaw the use of the deadline. He ran a

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stockade where by August more than one hundred men a

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day were dying inside walls he was responsible for, and

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inside that camp by the way. The prisoners had their

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own crisis. A gang called the Raiders was preying on

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the weakest men, robbing, beating, killing for food and supplies.

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The other prisoners eventually organized, captured them, tried them in

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a prisoner court, and hanged six of them inside the stockade.

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That's the kind of place this was. The prisoners were

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running their own murder trials while the camp around them

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killed one hundred men a day. By April eighteen sixty five,

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Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the camp emptied. The last of

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the men too sick to leave were buried. The total dead,

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by the best count we have, was twelve nine hundred

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and twelve, just under thirteen thousand Americans dead in a

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single fourteen month span on a piece of land smaller

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than a mid sized city park. Coming up the trial,

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two months of testimony in the same Washington courtroom where

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the Lincoln conspirators were judged, a prosecution witness whose real

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name turned out not to be his real name. A

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defense attorney trying to argue I was just following orders

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and inadvertently writing the legal precedent that would eighty years

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later be cited at Nuremberg Welcome back Daily Crime and Justice.

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I'm Garrett Fisher. Memorial Day twenty twenty six, May seventh,

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eighteen sixty five, US Captain N. E. Noys arrests Henry

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Words at Andersonville Wertz's position, and he keeps making this

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point in writing, is that he should be exempt from

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prosecution under the terms of surrender. He's a Confederate officer.

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The war's over. He wants safe passage back to Switzerland

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with his family. The next day he writes a letter

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to General James Wilson saying as much. The answer is no.

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He's transported to Washington and lands in a cell at

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the Old Capitol Prison, which is by the way, on

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the exact site where the United States Supreme Court building

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stands today. He sits in that cell for almost two months,

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waiting for trial. The trial opens August twenty third, eighteen

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sixty five. Military commission, not a civilian court. The presiding

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officer is Major General Lou Wallace, the same Lou Wallace

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who sixteen years later will publish a novel called Ben

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Hur But that's another story. The chief prosecutor is Judge

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Advocate Colonel N. P. Chipman. The chief defense lawyer is

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Louis Schad. The charges come down to essentially two things.

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One conspiracy to quote injure the health and destroy the

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lives of Union soldiers, and that alleged conspiracy is named

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to include Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other senior

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Confederate officials. Two a separate set of specific murder counts

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for prisoners where it's personally killed or ordered killed inside

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the camp. The trial runs two months, roughly one hundred

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and sixty witnesses. The testimony frankly all over the map.

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Prosecution witnesses describe a screaming, sadistic commander who shot prisoners himself,

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who set dogs on escape men, who ordered the deadline

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enforced with maximum cruelty. Defense witnesses, including a Catholic priest

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who was inside the stockade nearly every day, describe a

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man overwhelmed by an impossible situation who tried within his

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power to help. Here's where it gets ugly. One of

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the prosecution's witnesses is a man calling himself Felix de

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la Bomme, claiming to be a survivor of Andersonville. He

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gives detailed, lurid testimony after the trial wraps, somebody figures

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out who he actually is. His real name is Felix Oser.

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He's a Union deserter from the seventh New York Volunteers.

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Some accounts say he was at Andersonville briefly. The National

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Park Service today disputes how central his testimony actually was

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to the outcome. Either way, here's the fact a prosecution

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witness was lying about his identity, and nobody on the

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government side seems to have caught it before he took

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the stand. The verdict comes down October twenty fourth, eighteen

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sixty five, guilty on the conspiracy charge, Guilty on eleven

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of the specific murder counts, sentence death by hanging. President

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Andrew Johnson signs off. On November three, November tenth, eighteen

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sixty five. Ten thirty two in the morning, they march

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Henry Words up to a scaffold in the courtyard of

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the Old Capitol Prison. Reportedly, he turned to the officer

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commanding the execution detail and he said, quote, I know

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what orders are major, and I am being hanged for

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obeying them. The trap dropped, and as he died, the

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Union soldiers gathered around the gallows began to chant The

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chant was Remember Andersonville. Remember Andersonville, Remember Andersonville. So was

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he a monster or was he a scapegoat? Look, I'm

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going to be honest with you. Both things can be true,

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and in this case, I think both things are true.

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The trial was procedurally rough by modern standards. A clear

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majority of legal historians today will tell you Henry Wurtz

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did not get what we would now call due process.

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The conspiracy charge alleging that Jefferson Davis and Robert E.

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Lee personally conspired with him to kill Union prisoners was

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almost certainly not a real conspiracy. The country needed a

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face to put on a national rage, and verts was

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the face they had. He was foreign born, he had

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an accent. The North was traumatized. He was available, and

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at the same time he commanded a camp where a

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hundred men a day were dying. He had a documented temper.

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He carried a pistol, he used it. The conditions were

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beyond his control. The way he behaved inside those conditions

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was not entirely beyond his control. Defense witnesses said he

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tried to help. Prosecution witnesses said he made it worse.

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The truth is probably that both sets of witnesses saw

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what they saw on different days, in front of a

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man under unimaginable pressure who sometimes responded with restraint and

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sometimes responded with cruelty. What he was not was the

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architect of Andersonville. The architect of Andersonville was the prisoner

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exchange collapse, Sherman's March, the rotting Confederate supply chain, and

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an entire Confederate war effort that prioritized other things. Henry

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Wurtz was the man at the gate. He was accurately

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guilty of what happened on his watch. He was also

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accurately the only person who paid for it. Coming up

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how a twenty one year old former prisoner with a

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smuggled list, a Civil War nurse named Clara Barton, and

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a Union veterans organization three years later gave America the

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holiday you're observing right now, plus the monument in Georgia

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still standing in twenty twenty six that calls Henry Wurtz

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a martyr. You're listening to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm

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Garrett Fisher. Here is where Memorial Day actually starts. Summer

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of eighteen sixty five, While Wurts is sitting in his

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cell waiting for trial. Two other people are quietly doing

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the work that matters more. The first is a young

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man named Dorance Atwater. At Water is twenty one years old.

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He'd been a Union prisoner at Andersonville himself. Because he

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had clear handwriting, the Confederate Hospital used him as a

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clerk to maintain the death register. So Atwater watched thousands

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of men die. He wrote their names down for the

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official record, and then secretly, against every order, he kept

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his own copy. When he was released, he smuggled that

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list out with him, about thirteen thousand names. The second

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person is Clara Barton. You know her name as the

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founder of the American Red Cross. At this point in

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eighteen sixty five, she's running what she called the Missing

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Soldier's Office, fielding letters from American families who don't know

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whether their sons, husbands, brothers, fathers are dead or where

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they're buried. Atwater contacts her in June eighteen sixty five.

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He has the names she has the families. Secretary of

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War Stanton authorizes an expedition. Barton Atwater, an army captain

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named Moore, and forty two letterers and headboard carvers travel

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to Andersonville in July. They identify nearly every single grave,

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they mark them. They establish what is now Andersonville National Cemetery.

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On August seventeenth, eighteen sixty five, Clara Barton raises the

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American flag over that cemetery the first time the flag

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flies above it. That cemetery, with its thirteen thousand marked

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Union graves, becomes one of the places where Americans go

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to mourn. And three years later May fifth, eighteen sixty eight,

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the Command Under in Chief of the Grand Army of

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the Republic, the Major Union Veterans Organization, a Major General

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named John A. Logan, issues General Order Number eleven. The

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order designates May thirtieth as a day for quote strewing

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with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who

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died in defense of their country during the Late Rebellion.

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They called it Decoration Day. After the First World War,

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the holiday was expanded to honor American military dead from

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every war. In nineteen seventy one, it became a federal holiday.

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On the last Monday in May. You're observing it right now.

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That's the line from Andersonville to Atwater's smuggled list to

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Barton's expedition to thirteen thousand marked graves to a Union

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Veterans organization deciding the country needed a day to come

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stand in front of those graves with flowers in our hands.

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That is where a Memorial Day comes from. Now, the

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verd story doesn't end at the gallows. In nineteen Ohio, Oha,

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forty three years after the execution, the Georgia chapter of

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the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument to

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Henry Words. They built it in the town of Andersonville, Georgia,

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less than a mile from the cemetery where his prisoners

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are buried. The monument calls his execution judicial murder. It

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says he was the victim of misdirected popular clamor. It

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is as best anyone has been able to determine the

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only monument to a convicted war criminal anywhere in the

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United States. It is still standing. The United Daughters of

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the Confederacy still hold an annual memorial service at that monument.

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The most recent one was held just last November. Look,

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I'm gonna be honest with you. We can argue about

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whether the trial was fair. Most historians today, myself included,

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will tell you it wasn't by the standards we'd apply

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to it. Now. What we don't get to argue about

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is the body count. Thirteen thousand Americans died in that camp,

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and a monument that calls the man who ran the

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camp of martyr standing within walking distance of the graves

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is a choice. That's not a mistake. That's a choice.

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One more thing, The trial of Henry Wurtz procedurally flawed,

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as it was established a principle. The principle was this,

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I was just following orders is not by itself a

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complete legal defense for the mistreatment of prisoners of war.

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That principle was raised in his defense. It was rejected

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by the court, and eighty years later, when American and

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Allied lawyers were building the legal framework to prosecute Nazi

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war criminals after the Second World War, they looked back

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for an American precedent. They found one. They found Henry

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Wurts do better on this one. Is not sharp, It's

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a hand on the shoulder, pause before it. That's daily

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crime and justice. For Monday, May twenty fifth, twenty twenty six,

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Memorial Day, twelve, nine hundred and twelve Union soldiers died

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at Andersonville Prison in fourteen months. Almost all of them

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have names. Dorance Atwater wrote those names down. Clara Barton

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put those names on graves. John Logan three years later

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said the country needed a day to come stand in

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front of those graves with flowers in our hands. That's

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the day you're observing right now. Henry Wurtz was the

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man who ran the inside of that camp. He was

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hanged on November tenth, eighteen sixty five, in the courtyard

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of the Old Capitol Prison. He was the only Confederate

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ever executed for war crimes. Whether he deserved exactly that

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fate is something historians will keep arguing about. What's beyond

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argument is what happened to the men inside his walls.

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Someone has to say their names. Atwater and Barton already

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did thirteen thousand times. Tomorrow, we're back to regular coverage today.

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Take a minute, visit a grave if you've got one nearby,

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Read a name. If you don't, I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better.

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This is Daily Crime and Justice. Disclaimer. This episode covers

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historical events from eighteen sixty four to eighteen sixty five

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and includes editorial commentary by host Garrett Fisher. The fairness

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of the Vertz military tribunal and the extent of Vitz's

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personal culpability for conditions at Andersonville Prison are contested among historians.

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Views expressed about whether Vertz was a war criminal, a scapegoat,

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or both are editorial. The National Park Service disputes the

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traditional account of the Felix de la Baume slash Felix

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Oser controversy and the centrality of his testimony to the trial.

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Specific quotations attributed to Vertz at his execution are drawn

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from period accounts and may vary by source. Source materials

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include the US National Park Service, Andersonville National Historic Site

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and Clara Barton Missing Soldier's Office Museum, the Library of Congress,

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the American Battlefield Trust, the New Georgia Encyclopedia, and historical

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scholarship on the trial. Daily Crime and Justice is a

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production of Calaroga Shark Media