Revealed, the dark history of Hitler’s FIRST death camp: How Nazis murdered psychiatric patients – and their nurses – to test out gas chambers before they were used for mass extermination of the Jews 

By: Ed Wight In Poznan, Poland

• Nazis began experimenting with lethal gas in Poznan, west Poland, in 1939
• They used gas chambers to kill millions of Jewish people three years later
• SS abducted psychiatric patients and took them to the concentration camp
• They had killed more than 5,000 patients, hundreds of Poles there by 1940

Behind these gates emblazoned with the symbol of Hitler’s dreaded SS, lies one of the lesser known horrors of the Nazi occupation of Poland – the first use of gas chambers for mass extermination. Seized by the SS on October 10 1939, the 19th century Fort Colomb in the city of Poznan in west Poland was renamed Konzentrationslager Posen (Concentration Camp Poznan). But rather than serving as a holding space for prisoners of the Reich, what followed was the systematic murder of psychiatric patients, local resistance fighters, academics, the intelligentsia and anyone seen by the Nazis as a threat.

It wouldn’t be until three years later that the use of gas chambers to eliminate the Jewish population became a Third Reich policy. But 76 years ago this month, it was decided that Fort VII, as it is known, would be the first place to experiment with gas in the mass killing of civilians.

Villanous: An SS guard opens the door to the notorious Concentration Camp Poznan where thousands of psychiatric patients were gassed to death as Nazis experimented with lethal gases used to eventually kill six million Jews across Europe

Cursed place: The SS abducted patients from a psychiatric hospital (pictured) in the nearby town of Owinska and took them to the concentration camp in Poznan to be gassed

Haunting legacy: The Nazis seized this 19th Century fort and renamed it the Konzentrationslager Posen – or Concentration Camp Poznan – in 1939, three years before they used gas chambers to kill millions of Jews.

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