one of the questions that we should ask about andersonville is not why wirz was tried, but why was wirz the only one who was tried? one of the things we need to think about when we think about the end of the war is not the wirz trial but the failure to try a number of other significant confederate leaders for what today we would describe as war crimes. one of the problems with the jurisprudence of post-civil war america is nobody has a conception of really what a war crime is. when he is put on trial, they want to put him on trial for murder, and the charge is you have to prove that wirz himself murdered prisoners of war. i think there is fairly strong evidence he did shoot prisoners of war. there is strong evidence he may have simply killed or ordered the summary execution of people for no good reason at all, but what the trial really is is the beginnings of the concept of war crimes and the concepts of crimes against humanity and the idea that some people can be tried not for what they did in the direct sense of killing people, but rather for their leadership, for their crimes of omis

. >> swiss born confederate captain wirz was in charge of the andersonville prisoner of war camp where thousands of union prisoners died. author and law professor paul finkelman discusses the military trial and execution and the concept of war crimes established in the trial. this is a porti