Dachau concentration camp appears in the biography not as a fully narrated institutional history but through Bernard Peters’s experience of imprisonment and the testimony he carried with him. Arrested after Adolf Hitler came to power, Peters endured three terrifying months in the camp before being transferred to a Munich prison. His account of Dachau later brought the violence of Nazi persecution into the lives of people who knew him in California.

A place in Peters’s flight from Nazi Germany

Born in Posen in 1910, Peters studied electrical engineering in Munich. After his arrest and imprisonment at Dachau, he was transferred to a Munich prison and then released without explanation. Another version of the story has him escaping from prison. He spent several months traveling at night by bicycle through southern Germany and across the Alps to Italy, where he reunited with Hannah Peters, who had fled to Padua to study medicine. They immigrated to the United States in April 1934.

Testimony of violence

In 1934, Peters wrote a 3,000-word account of what he had witnessed at Dachau, describing the torture and summary execution of prisoners. The account conveyed violence at close range: one prisoner, he reported, died in his hands hours after a beating, his back stripped of skin and his muscles left in shreds. The camp is therefore represented in the biography through both the fact of Peters’s confinement and the specific witness testimony he produced afterward.

The camp’s afterlife in California

After settling in the San Francisco Bay area, Peters met J. Robert Oppenheimer through Jean Tatlock. By then Peters was working as a longshoreman; when he showed an interest in physics, Oppenheimer encouraged him to study at Berkeley and helped him enter its graduate program. Peters became Oppenheimer’s quantum-mechanics note-taker and wrote his thesis under his supervision. The biography does not establish whether Oppenheimer read Peters’s written account of Dachau or heard him describe the atrocities. It does suggest that Peters’s experience gave him a seriousness shaped by events far beyond the ordinary experience of his academic circle. Through him, Dachau’s history entered the story of Oppenheimer’s Berkeley years as lived testimony, while the precise route by which that testimony reached Oppenheimer remains uncertain.