Dachau concentration camp enters the narrative as a place Hugh Legat recognizes on a nighttime drive with Paul von Hartmann, and its appearance gives physical weight to their disagreement about political responsibility. Seen from the edge of town, the camp is a vast, enclosed complex: barbed-wire fencing, watchtowers, barracks and a searchlight sweeping a parade ground. Its scale makes it seem like a town within the neighboring town, an image that recasts the seemingly ordinary landscape around it as the setting for mass detention.

Approach and Appearance

As the city gives way to suburbs, factories and then open country, Legat grows anxious about how long the drive will take; Hartmann assures him they will return before morning. They pass through a sleeping Bavarian town and then another, whose whitewashed and half-timbered buildings, red-tiled roofs, shops and garage initially appear unremarkable. The name Dachau changes the meaning of the journey for Legat. Hartmann drives through the empty streets to the town’s edge, stops, switches off the engine and headlights, and leaves the camp visible across the road. The contrast between familiar town buildings and the fenced complex makes the camp’s presence both unmistakable and startling.

Legat and Hartmann at the Camp

Hartmann asks whether Legat understands what the place is. Legat replies that it has been reported in the press and that there have been regular demonstrations against Nazi repression in London. When Hartmann asks whether Legat joined them, Legat indicates that he did not. Hartmann rebukes him for treating the issue as self-evident or remote, pointing to the existence of larger camps in the Soviet Union and asking whether opposing those abuses would also mean going to war with the Soviet Union. The exchange places Legat’s abstract political reasoning beside the camp itself, which neither man can treat as an abstraction while standing within sight of it.

The Munich Agreement and the Camp’s Political Meaning

Hartmann’s warning is directed toward the consequences of the Munich Agreement: some people transferred into Germany under its terms, he says, may end up in Dachau before the year is out. Legat counters that they might have ended up there anyway, unless they had been killed in bombing. Hartmann answers that this outcome was not inevitable if Hitler had been deposed. The camp thus becomes the concrete endpoint in an argument about the agreement’s human cost, the danger of war and the possibility of resistance. The scene leaves the disagreement unresolved, but makes clear that the people affected by diplomatic decisions may face consequences beyond the immediate transfer of territory.