next to the pits full of black-blue corpses. It had nothing to do with humanityit could not have. It was a massa mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said 'What shall we do with this garbage?' I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo. In May 1943, after Himmler's visit to Sobibór and Treblinka, Wirth was promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (Major). On 3 November 1943, after the Sobibór uprising, SS and police units shot all of the Jewish labor forces still incarcerated at Trawniki, Poniatowa, and Majdanek concentration camps during Aktion Erntefest ("Operation Harvest Festival"); 42,000 prisoners in all. When Operation Reinhard was terminated after three million Polish Jews and thousands of Gypsies were murdered, Wirth was sent to Trieste in Italy along with the other former Aktion Reinhard staff. From autumn 1943, Wirth's role was to oversee the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp as well as to combat partisans over the border in occupied Yugoslavia. He commanded SS Task Force R, which engaged in antipartisan and anti-Jewish actions in the Trieste-Fiume-Udine area of northern Italy. The Jews of this area were to be concentrated at San Sabba and eventually killed. Upon Wirth's order a crematorium was built at San Sabba. Allegedly to remove potential future witnesses, their superiors assigned former death camp staff to the most dangerous job they could find: anti-partisan combat. While in prison in 1971, Stangl stated in an interview, "We were an embarrassment to our [superiors]. They wanted to find ways and means to 'incinerate' us." Wirth was killed in May 1944 by Yugoslav Partisans while travelling in an open-topped car on an official trip to Fiume. He was buried with full military honours in the German Military Cemetery in Opcina, near Trieste. His remains were transferred in 1959 to the block 15, tomb 716 of the German Military Cemetery at Costermano, near Lake Garda, northern Italy. Death Wirth was shot and killed by Yugoslav partisans near Kozina, Istria, on 26 May 1944. Sources Bresheeth, Hood and Jansz, The Holocaust for Beginners, Icon Books, 1994, Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, Penguin, 1990, Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, Fontana, 1990, Laurence Rees, The Holocaust, Penguin/Viking, 2017, Gitta Sereny, The German Trauma, Penguin, 2000, References External links Christian Wirth 1885 births 1944 deaths 1944 murders in Europe Assassinated Nazis People from Alb-Donau-Kreis People from the Kingdom of Württemberg Nazi Party members