NAZI TRAINING CAMP FOR GASSING PEOPLE

   The Nazis operated what was essentially a training camp for gassing people as much as a year before they began the large-scale expulsions of Jews to gas chambers, historian Wally de Lang says in a new book.
   It began, de Lang told the BBC, when hundreds of Dutchmen were rounded up, in what is known as a  razzia, from the streets of Amsterdam in early 1941 — the first Nazi raids on Jews in Western Europe. Germany had overtaken the Netherlands the previous spring and the razzia was revenge for the killing of a Dutch Nazi collaborator.
“We always thought the first deportation train departed in July 1942. These razziamen were already deported on 27 February 1941, so that’s much earlier,” De Lang said.
   The last stop for the Dutchmen was the 17th century Hartheim Castle in Upper Austria. In 1940, it had been turned into a killing centre, with a gas chamber retrofitted to a specially adapted room.