In the Garden of Beasts

Dachau, which he described as an “artists village.” From there he walked another half hour to reach the camp.
    He was surprised by what he found. “More atrocity reports have come from this camp than any other one in Germany,” he wrote. “The outward appearance though is better than any camp I have seen.” The former gunpowder plant in which the camp was located had been built during the past world war. “There were good houses for the chemists and the officers; the barracks for the workers were more stable, and the whole plant was steam heated,” MacMaster saw. “This makes Dachau seem better equipped for the comfort of the prisoners, especially in cold weather, than the provisional camp in an old factory or farm house. In fact the appearance of the whole is more that of a permanent institution than that of a camp.”
    The inmate, Simon, was soon brought to the guardhouse to meet with MacMaster. He wore a gray prison suit and seemed well. “He had no complaint,” MacMaster wrote, “except that he was suffering a great deal from acute rheumatism.”
    Later that day MacMaster spoke to a police official who told him the camp housed two thousand prisoners. Only twenty-five were Jews, and these, the official insisted, were held for political offenses, not because of their religion. MacMaster, however, had heard reports that at least five thousand prisoners were housed within and that forty to fifty were Jews, of whom only “one or two” had been arrested for political offenses; others had been arrested following denunciations by people “who wanted to injure them in business and others because they were accused of associating with non-Jewish girls.” He was surprised to hear the official say that he saw the camps “as temporary and would welcome the day when they could be done away with.”
    MacMaster found Dachau even had a certain beauty. “It was a very cold morning,” he wrote. “There had been such a dense fog the night before that I had had a hard time finding my hotel. This morning there was a perfect blue sky, Bavarian colors were white, for the clouds, and blue for the Bavarian sky, and the fog of the night before covered the trees with a thick hoar-frost.” Everything was coated with a glistening lace of ice crystals that gave the camp an ethereal look, like something from a fable. In the sun the birches of the surrounding moor became spires of diamond.
    But as in so many situations in the new Germany, the outward appearance of Dachau was misleading. The cleanliness and efficiency of the camp had little to do with a desire to treat the inmates in a humane fashion. The preceding June an SS officer named Theodor Eicke had taken command of Dachau and composed a set of regulations that later became the model for all camps. Issued on October 1, 1933, the new rules codified the relationship between guards and prisoners and in so doing removed the act of punishment from the realm of impulse and caprice to a plane where discipline became systematic, dispassionate, and predictable. Now everyone at least knew the rules, but the rules were harsh and explicitly left no room for pity.
    “Tolerance means weakness,” Eicke wrote in the introduction to his rules. “In the light of this conception, punishment will be mercilessly handed out whenever the interests of the fatherland warrant it.” Minor offenses drew beatings with a cane and stints insolitary confinement. Even irony was costly. Eight days’ solitary and “twenty-five strokes” were meted out to “anyone making depreciatory or ironical remarks to a member of the SS, deliberately omitting the prescribed marks of respect, or in any other way demonstrating unwillingness to submit himself to disciplinary measures.” A catchall clause, Article 19, dealt with “incidental punishments,” which were to include reprimands, beatings, and “tying to stakes.” Another section laid out the rules for hangings. Death was the penalty for anyone who, “for the purpose of agitating,” discussed politics or was caught meeting with others. Even collecting “true or false information about the concentration camp” or receiving such information or talking about it with others could get an inmate hanged. “If a prisoner attempts to escape,” Eicke wrote, “he is to be shot without warning.” Gunfire also was the required response to prisoner uprisings. “Warning shots,” Eicke wrote, “are forbidden on principle.”
    Eicke made sure all new