In January, 1940 a shower room fitted with a carbon monoxide vent was first tested to kill patients at the psychiatric hospital in Brandenberg, outside Berlin. Gas chambers on the Brandenberg model were quickly set up at Bernberg and other sites around Germany to accept patients marked for death. In 1940-41, more than 70,000 patients were poisoned with carbon monoxide at these extermination centers. Other patients were starved; given sleeping pills, morphine or scopolamine; or slowly administered poisons to disguise the cause of death. No such ruse was thought necessary in Poland and East Prussia, where storm troopers simply shot thousands of mental patients. (DNAi location: Chronicle > In the Third Reich > "the final solution")

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