Around this time 76 years ago, the Nazis began kidnapping psychiatric patients in western Poland, herding dozens of victims at a time and loading them into trucks before transporting them to the gas chamber, reports the Daily Mail in a graphic piece on the sadistic actions of the Nazi regime.

Killing mentally ill patients via gassing was the Nazi’s first use of gas chambers for mass extermination, three years later they would begin to use this gruesome method of killing to wipe out a large majority of the Jewish population.

Daily Mail reports: “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.”

Mentally ill patients were forced into trucks and driven to concentration camps where they were gassed to death

The patients were rounded up from a nearby town called Owinska and taken back to Fort. Colomb, or Fort VII, as it was later known, which was viewed an “ideal place” for killing victims as it was “surrounded by dirt walls and vegetation but was also within easy reach of the centre where the Gestapo based its headquarters.”

Twenty-five male psychiatric patients were squeezed into truck, with three trucks arriving at the hospital each day. The victims were forced to march “across a bridge” and guided to the back of the concentration camp where two gas chambers stood atop a hill.

“Once inside, the doors were sealed with clay and carbon monoxide was pumped in through a hole.”

After all of the male patients had been killed, the Nazis returned for the women, and then the children, gassing them all to death in less than two months.

“In the end, no-one was spared. The hospital staff were also driven to the camp and gassed to death and the hospital was turned into an SS barracks.”

Satisfied with the results, “the Nazis began using mobile gas chambers in specially adapted vans to kill patients from other hospitals in the area.

“With the exhaust pipe leading directly into the back of the vans, the patients were gassed to death while being driven to nearby forests where they were later buried in mass graves.”

More than 1,000 patients were gassed to death by Gestapo commander Herbert Lange and his men, and another 2,750 were taken from a psychiatric hospital in the nearby town of Koscina and killed. More than 1,500 patients and 300 Poles from the town of Dzialdowo, 179 miles away, were also killed.

Nazi leaders praised for their killings, told it made them tougher men

The Nazi commanders were praised for their work and told they were “decent men” in speeches given by Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler in October 1943.

“Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000,” said Himmler.

“To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.”

Author of Poznan 1945 and local historian Michal Krzyaniak told the Daily Mail that officially Fort VII “…was a prison and temporary camp for local civilians, but in reality it was mainly an extermination camp.

“Prisoners who didn’t end up in the gas chamber were tortured and beaten to death. The names of the victims are still unknown because all documents have been destroyed.

“But it is estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed by torture, execution and gassing.”

Additional sources:

DailyMail.co.uk