Nazi persecution of Jews and political opponents

Nazi persecution of Jews and political opponents is rendered through both the imposing presence of Dachau concentration camp and the history of a woman punished for communist activity and then subjected to intensified persecution because she was Jewish. The contrast between the camp’s scale and the particular fate Hartmann recounts turns repression from something Legat has encountered in public reports into a personal and political reality he can no longer treat as abstract.

The camp at Dachau

On the drive from Munich, Hartmann takes Legat through ordinary towns and eventually to Dachau. The approach matters: the camp is not presented as a distant rumor but as a structure encountered at the edge of an inhabited place. From the road, Legat sees a high barbed-wire fence, watchtowers and barracks. Its size makes the strongest impression on him; it resembles a captive town beside the town itself.

Legat already knows what the site is. He says that the press has reported on it repeatedly and that demonstrations against Nazi repression have taken place in London. His knowledge, however, has remained at a remove. When Hartmann asks whether he joined those demonstrations, Legat explains that, as a civil servant, he was expected to remain politically neutral. The exchange sets public protest beside official neutrality: repression is visible in the news and contested in the streets, yet Legat has kept himself outside that contest by observing the limits of his professional role.

A communist woman’s repeated arrests

Hartmann recounts the woman’s political history as a series of arrests and returns to underground activity. After she and Hartmann separated following Munich, she went back to Berlin and became more deeply involved with the communists. She worked with a communist newspaper that continued to appear clandestinely after the Nazis banned it. In 1935, she was caught in a raid and sent to Moringen, a camp for women.

By then, she had married a fellow communist. He later died fighting in Spain. After his death, she was released, but returned to communist activity and was arrested again. Her case thus shows political persecution operating through repeated detention rather than a single, completed episode: release does not end the danger when she resumes the commitments that brought her to the authorities’ attention. The account also links her persecution to the underground press, whose continued publication made political opposition persist despite its formal prohibition.

Antisemitic persecution and its consequences

The second arrest brought a further and more severe dimension to her treatment: the authorities discovered that she was Jewish. Hartmann says she was treated more harshly, and recounts that officials claimed she had fallen from a third-floor window. He is sure that the fall happened, but says it followed an act of antisemitic abuse in which a Star of David was carved into her back. The narrative does not leave this as an isolated injury: Hartmann reports that her brain was too badly damaged for her to recover, and that she needed long-term care.

This history connects political repression and antisemitism without treating them as interchangeable. The woman had already been arrested for communist work; her Jewish identity then exposed her to still harsher abuse. Through her experience, the persecution of political opponents and the persecution of Jews become mutually illuminating aspects of the regime’s violence. Hartmann’s account also rejects the comforting idea that antisemitism might be separated from other Nazi actions or dismissed as a passing excess. For him, the treatment of Jews reveals what the regime is capable of more broadly.

Hartmann’s limited intervention

The woman’s mother, a widow and former teacher with little money, contacted Hartmann to ask whether his influence could secure proper treatment for her daughter. Hartmann says that he tried to help but could not reverse the damage. His practical intervention was to pay for a place in a nursing home. He also says that, because of his position, the institution agreed to overlook the fact that she was Jewish.

That arrangement offers care, but only as a narrow exception dependent on Hartmann’s standing. It does not undo the persecution, restore the woman’s health or change the conditions that made her Jewish identity an obstacle to ordinary treatment. Hartmann rejects Legat’s description of his conduct as decent, emphasizing the inadequacy of what he was able to do. His effort is therefore both consequential and sharply limited: it supports the woman’s care, while exposing how little private influence can repair what state violence has already done.

Legat’s changed understanding

The account alters Legat’s response to what he has previously known through newspapers and demonstrations. After hearing what happened to the woman, he feels sick and crushes the cigarette in his hand. Hartmann connects her fate to a lesson he says he has learned over six years: Nazi antisemitism cannot be isolated from the regime’s other conduct or treated as an aberration that will simply pass. In his reasoning, a system capable of such persecution cannot be trusted to observe limits elsewhere.

Legat answers that he now understands. The scene’s force lies in the movement from formal knowledge to recognition: he had known of the repression and had invoked political neutrality, but the camp at Dachau and the woman’s history give that knowledge a human consequence he cannot keep at a distance. Her story also makes Hartmann’s warning concrete. Persecution is not an abstract stain beside the regime’s other policies; in his account, it is evidence of the regime’s capacity for further harm.