Why was Wirz framed?

Why was Wirz framed?

The fact that Wirz's trial was a transparent farce is beyond any serious dispute, and this fact is readily admitted by modern authorities.  According to Confederate Veteran magazine, Captain Glen LaForce of the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General's School wrote an article in 1988 in which he detailed the trial's glaring improprieties, and stated that "The trial of Henry Wirz was a national disgrace."  But why did it happen? One modern source gives this explanation:

All of the anguish of Andersonville required someone to blame, someone to hate. And all of the blame was laid upon its commander, Major Henry Wirz. He was an easy man to hate, a foreigner who spoke poor English....

"Hysteria and exaggeration of prison excesses in the South soon swept the Yankee press and pulpit. Tales of every sort of torture were told, many of them imagined, more greatly exaggerated, but the public listened and believed.  Inevitably, someone had to pay for the horrors. Winder was dead, and that left Wirz.

"In May 1865 he was arrested and taken to Washington where he was subjected to a sham of a trial before a military tribunal. Wirz became the classic victim of circumstance.. he was convicted of 'murder in violation of the laws and customs of war.' There had never been any doubt about the verdict or the sentence.

"Ironically, today, over the spot where he died, symbolic of the justice which he was denied, stands  the  United  States Supreme Court."

--From "The Fighting Men of the Civil War," Galley Books, New York, N.Y., 1989.

Lt. Page says it more concisely:

"Major Wirz was the object of that popular injustice which personifies causes and demands victims for unpopular movements.  All the accumulated passions of the war were concentrated on this one man. He was a magnet that drew the Northern wrath to satiety."