Fort VII Museum

Muzeum Martyrologii Wielkopolan - Fort VII

The Fort VII Museum in Poznań commemorates the National Socialist camp which was in operation in the former Prussian stronghold Fort VII between 1939 and 1944. Here was the place where at the end of 1939, the SS murdered patients of psychiatric hospitals for the first time by poison gas.

History

Following the partition of Poland at the end of the 18th Century, the region of Poznań (German: Posen) became part of Prussia; after World War I, it once again became Polish. When the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland in September 1939, the region was incorporated into the German Reich and administered as the »Warthegau«. In October 1939, the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, SiPo) established a prison camp in Fort VII (also called Fort Colomb) – one of 18 Prussian fortresses which ringed Poznań since the end of the 19th Century. By mid-November 1939, the SiPo incarcerated members of the Polish elites in the »Posen concentration camp«. Most of the prisoners were executed within days of being brought to the prison.
Between October and December 1939, the SS murdered about 400 patients of psychiatric wards in Owińska and Poznań by poison gas - most probably carbon monoxide. This crime was the first known mass murder of civilians by poison gas.
After 1939, the National Socialist administration renamed and repurposed the camp multiple times. Until about mid-1941, the Gestapo mainly held Polish resistance fighters in the »transit camp«. The prisoners were held there for several months before they were either executed or transferred to other camps. From May 1941 on, Fort VII served as a »labour education camp«; most of the prisoners were Poles who refused to conduct forced labour for the »Third Reich«. From March 1943 on, prisoners of Fort VII were deployed in the construction of the Gestapo camp in Poznań-Żabikowo. In April 1944, all of the prisoners were transferred to that camp, and the camp in Fort VII was dissolved. A factory of the Telefunken company was established in its place – there too forced labourers were deployed.

Poznań, 1939, Renamed streets, Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-E11572

Poznań, 2010, Entrance to the museum, Muzeum Martyrologii Wielkopolan Fort VII

Victims

The SS mainly incarcerated Poles at Fort VII: at first, the prisoners were members of the Polish elites and upper classes, later, the people imprisoned there were Poles who had breached orders of the occupation forces or who were suspected of being in the political or military resistance. Many were executed at Fort VII, others died of the effects of torture or due to the inhumane living conditions. There were at least two typhus epidemics at the camp, taking the lives of many undernourished and weakened prisoners.
Between October and December 1939, the SS murdered about 400 mentally ill patients with poison gas.
It is not known exactly how many prisoners were held at Fort VII in total or how many of them died, since the National Socialists destroyed all the evidence before retreating. The names of on 479 victims of the camp are known. It is assumed that about 18,000 prisoners passed through the camp, of which some 4,500 perished. Some historians consider much higher numbers realistic.

The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients. At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS. Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation. Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland. Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period. The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.

Remembrance

Poznań has since the end of the war been Polish again; today, it is the capital of the voivodeship of Greater Poland (Polish: Wielkopolska) and one of the most important cities of the country. After the war, the fortress served as a materials warehouse for the Polish army and consequently the premises were closed to visitors. In 1963, a first memorial site was dedicated in Fort VII on the initiative of an organisation of former resistance fighters – this was made open to the public on certain days. First plans for a museum in Fort VII came about in 1976; three years later the Muzeum Martyrologii Wielkopolan Fort VII (literally: Museum of Martyrdom of the Residents of Greater Poland) was opened. The museum is currently run by the Wielkopolska Museum of the Struggle for Independence in Poznań (Wielkopolskie Muzeum Walk Niepodległościowych w Poznaniu), which commemorates events such as the fight for independence in 1918/19 or the Poznań workers' uprising in 1956. The suffering of the victims of Fort VII is portrayed using both objects of daily use and tableau scenes. The most important site of remembrance is the »death wall«, where many of the prisoners were shot.

Poznań, 1946, Commemorative ceremony with the victims' next of kin, Muzeum Martyrologii Wielkopolan Fort VII

Poznań, 2010, The »death wall«, where many of the prisoners were shot, Muzeum Martyrologii Wielkopolan Fort VII

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, guided tours in Polish and English

Open

Tuesday to Saturday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (from November to February to 4 p.m.)
Sunday: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Closed on Mondays

Contact

http://www.wmn.poznan.pl/odwiedz-nas/muzeum-martyrologii-wielkopolan-fort-vii/

mmw@wmn.poznan.pl

+48 (61) 848 313 8

al. Polska
60-591 Poznań

Poznań, 2010, Cell block at Fort VII, Muzeum Martyrologii Wielkopolan Fort VII

Poznań, 2010, Main entrance to Fort VII, Muzeum Martyrologii Wielkopolan Fort VII

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