Test run for the 'final solution'

In the summer of 1941 over a thousand prisoners from concentration camps were also murdered in Pirna-Sonnenstein as part of 'special treatment 14f13'. At this time the camps did yet have their own gas chambers.

The scale of the prisoner transports to Sonnenstein is not yet fully known. Transports from the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps are documented. The victims primarily included sick persons and those unfit for labour but also Jewish and political prisoners. The mass gassing in late June 1941 of 575 Auschwitz prisoners, nearly all of them Poles, marks the transition to crimes on a scale never seen before.

In the first half of 1942 camps to exterminate the Polish Jews were set up in eastern Poland. These camps were able to draw on the experience of 'Action T4'. About one-third of those employed at the Sonnenstein killing centre were later posted to the Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps in 1942 and 1943.