Dachau

Dachau enters this biography both as a site of Nazi persecution and as a place whose history became entangled with the postwar scrutiny of Bernard Peters. Peters’s imprisonment, his account of release, and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s later doubts about his reliability made Dachau more than a location: it became part of a dispute over what survival under Nazi rule could be taken to mean.

Imprisonment and Release

Peters, a Jewish academic, was apparently arrested in 1933 on a warrant issued by Munich’s State Secret Police on suspicion of illegal Communist activity. A further police order, dated October 14, accused him of Communist activity and barred him from continuing his academic studies. The biography cautions against accepting these accusations at face value: Peters was Jewish, and the Nazis were in power.

Peters’s own record identifies him as a prisoner at Dachau, near Munich. After what the account describes as three terrifying months, he testified that he was transferred to a prison in Munich and then released. His report, titled “Report of a Prisoner at the Concentration Camp at Dachau, Near Munich,” was written in New York in 1934. The surviving details establish the broad sequence of arrest, imprisonment, transfer, and release, without resolving every circumstance of his time in custody.

A Memory Recast in Political Testimony

Years later, Dachau returned in a very different setting: testimony concerning Peters’s political reliability. Oppenheimer, who had mentored and supported him, questioned how far Peters could be trusted, citing what he described as Peters’s use of guile to escape from Dachau. The remark made the former prisoner’s means of survival relevant to a political judgment made long after his release.

That judgment drew a sharp response. Condon later said he was horrified that Oppenheimer had challenged Peters’s trustworthiness in a committee hearing, especially so soon after the murder of millions of Jews and given Peters’s own experience of Nazi imprisonment. In this retelling, Dachau was no longer only the place Peters had been held; it was the historical context that made Oppenheimer’s words seem especially painful.

Historical and Biographical Significance

The evidence presents Dachau through documents and recollections rather than a sustained account of the camp itself. Peters’s prisoner report, his testimony about transfer and release, and the later controversy over Oppenheimer’s statement each offer a different kind of record. Taken together, they show how a past of persecution could be invoked in a later inquiry—and how the meaning of an individual’s survival could itself become contested.

For Oppenheimer’s biography, the reference is consequential because it exposes the personal cost of his testimony about a former protégé. For Peters, it connects the documented fact of imprisonment to a later public suspicion cast on his conduct under Nazi confinement. The record preserves both the weight of Dachau as a place of persecution and the unresolved tension surrounding the way that history was used in a subsequent political confrontation.