Kocborowo
Just north of Starogard Gdanski, about fifty kilometres south of Gdansk, there is a mental hospital that the Germans took over when Poland was occupied. Within the Nazi racial ideology, mentally ill people were useless eaters and thus a burden to society and not worthy life. Between September 1939 and January 1940, about 1700 patients from the hospital were taken to a nearby forest area in Szpegawsk and shot and buried in mass graves. In July 1940, 510 patients were transported to the euthanasia centre in Pirna, Germant, where they were murdered in a gas chamber. In addition to adult patients, about 500 mentally ill children were also murdered in Kocborowo.
Current status: Preserved with monument (2015).
Address: Skarszewska 7, 83-200 Starogard Gdanski.
Get there: Car.
Follow up in books: Friedlander, Henry: The Origins of Nazi Genocide – From euthanasia to the final solution (1995).
The mental hospital is still in use and is, if not Poland’s largest, one of the largest. At a nearby cemetery, there is a monument dedicated to the approximately 500 children from the mental hospital who were murdered by the Nazis.