ANDERSONVILLE (1996) B

The civil war was gory and brutal. Medical care almost nonexistent, disease, such as malaria and dysentery rampant in the field. The best guess today is that almost 750,00 men lost their lives. Just imagine how many others were traumatized for life.

To top off all of this civil war horror, this film depicts a compound in Andersonville, Georgia where Union troops were held prisoner. No clean water. no sanitation, no protection from the weather, no medical care, little food and little chance of escape. HORROR AND HELL ON EARTH. Commanded by a confederate officer by the name of Wirz . . . who had the capability to make it better for all. This movie is not for everyone because it shows hell . . . and shows it . . . and shows it. 

 A very important movie/miniseries but has no redeeming value except showing what man can do to other men and showing the compassion a disciple some men showed under there unbelievable hardship. Essentially Adersonville prison was a Nazi concentration camp without the ovens and without barracks. In 1864–5, more than 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned in Andersonville. 12,912 died there. When the War ended, Captain Henry Wirz, the prison’s commandant, was arrested and charged with conspiring with high Confederate officials to “impair and injure the health and destroy the lives . . .of Federal prisoners” and “murder in violation of the laws of war.”

 Such a conspiracy never previously existed, but public anger and indignation throughout the North over the conditions at Andersonville demanded action. Tried and found guilty by a military tribunal, Wirz was hanged in Washington, D.C., on November 10, 1865. Wirz was the only person executed for war crimes during the Civil War. 

 A prisoner described his entry into the prison camp: "As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect;—stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin. Many of our men, in the heat and intensity of their feeling, exclaimed with earnestness. "Can this be hell?" "God protect us!" and all thought that He alone could bring them out alive from so terrible a place. 
In the center of the whole was a swamp, occupying about three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague-spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings, was more than we cared to think of just then."