of the Confederacy initiated a construction of a monument honoring Henry Wirz in Andersonville, Georgia. Every year the UDC and SCV hold a memorial service at the monument. Until recently, SCV annually marched to Wirz's memorial in Andersonville along with supporters of a congressional pardon for him. The SCV posthumously awarded Wirz their Confederate Medal of Honor, created in 1977. During and after the trial Wirz was reviled in the court of public opinion as "The Demon of Andersonville". One controversy concerns a witness for the prosecution, Felix de la Baume, who was actually Felix Oesser, a deserter from the 7th New York Volunteers (Steuben) regiment. According to the National Park Service, de la Baume was definitely a prisoner at Andersonville and it is a myth that he was a key witness at the trial. After time passed, some writers suggested Wirz's tribunal was unfair and claimed that "Wirz did not receive a fair trial. Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to death." Even a few of his former prisoners conceded during the trial that the minimal support Wirz received from the Confederate government in terms of food, water, and medical supplies made the conditions at Andersonville beyond his scope of responsibility. In 1980, historian Morgan D. Peoples referred to Wirz as a "scapegoat." Wirz's conviction remains controversial. Despite the surrounding controversy, the Wirz trial was one of the nation's significant early war crimes tribunals, creating enduring moral and legal notions and established the precedent that certain wartime behavior is unacceptable, regardless if committed under the orders of superiors or on one's own. In popular culture Wirz is an important character in MacKinlay Kantor's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Andersonville (1955), introduced in the third chapter during his mission to France in October 1863. In Saul Levitt's 1959 play The Andersonville Trial, Wirz was first played by Herbert Berghof. When the play was recreated for an episode of PBS's 1970–71 season of Hollywood Television Theatre, Wirz was portrayed by Richard Basehart. Wirz was portrayed by the Czech actor Jan Tříska in the American film Andersonville (1996). See also Libby Prison – another infamous Confederate Civil War prison Camp Douglas, sometimes described as "The North's Andersonville" Tokyo Trials Concentration Camps Footnotes References External links Entries from Wirz's diary made days before his execution Henry Wirz biography Documents suggesting Wirz's innocence Trial of Captain Henry Wirz, a class assignment for The Seminar in