Dachau concentration camp is presented through sharply contrasting accounts of imprisonment and death. In Paul Doll’s retrospective tale, it is the site of Dieter Kruger’s cell in 1933 and the starting point for a history of imagined punishments that Doll later admits he embellished; in the account of the war’s end, it is where Konrad Peters dies of typhus among approximately twelve thousand prisoners during the first four months of 1945. The camp thus connects the novel’s unstable stories about persecution with the lethal consequences of the system those stories invoke.

Kruger’s Cell and Doll’s Recollection

Doll recalls that he and his associates had made Kruger a source of amusement while Kruger was held in a cell at Dachau in 1933. The recollection is narrated from the perspective of a perpetrator looking back on his own conduct, but Doll’s account soon reveals its unreliability: the later suffering he assigns to Kruger was, he says, something he imagined. He mentally moved Kruger from prison to prison and camp to camp, inventing solitary confinement, penal labour, starvation rations, medical experiments, and floggings.

The scale of this invention matters. Doll describes the imagined punishments as a private source of amusement during the years 1934 to 1940, but acknowledges that he overdid the story until people stopped believing him. His account therefore distinguishes the remembered cell at Dachau from the subsequent itinerary he fabricated. It also shows how cruelty persists in his memory as entertainment: even when he admits that the later episodes were invented, he recounts them as a catalogue of suffering he had elaborately devised.

Kruger’s Fate and the Limits of the Story

A later account of Kruger’s fate gives Doll’s invention a decisive chronological limit. Kruger is described as a Communist and published political philosopher who was executed after being linked to an earlier arson at a welfare office in Neukölln. The story places his execution in January 1934, alongside that of the Dutch arsonist responsible for the Reichstag Fire. Kruger’s death means Doll’s imagined transfers and ordeals across the years that followed could not have happened as he pictured them.

In a separate recollection, Martin Bormann tells the story of Kruger to Gerda Bormann. The night before the execution, Bormann and several companions went to death row with bottles of champagne. This episode does not establish that the visit took place at Dachau; instead, it widens the novel’s portrait of how Kruger’s imprisonment and death are remembered by people connected to the regime. The camp remains the specifically named setting of Doll’s account of the 1933 cell, while the later retelling emphasizes the execution that ended Kruger’s life.

Peters’s Death in 1945

Dachau returns in the account of Konrad Peters’s fate. Peters was among approximately five thousand suspects arrested in connection with the July 20, 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was also among approximately twelve thousand prisoners who died of typhus at Dachau during the first four months of 1945. The narration places his death within a mass toll rather than presenting it as an isolated event, linking his arrest as a suspect to the camp’s deadly final months.

Peters’s fate differs from Kruger’s in the way the narrative records it. Kruger’s story is mediated through Doll’s retrospective recollection and Bormann’s later telling; Peters’s is stated as a concise account of arrest and death, with numbers that place an individual among thousands. The novel gives no further description of Peters’s time at Dachau, so the camp’s significance here lies in that compressed conjunction of political suspicion, imprisonment, disease, and death.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, Dachau is not developed as a panoramic setting. It enters through particular human fates: Kruger in a cell, and Peters among the prisoners who died of typhus. That narrow focus makes the camp a point where different kinds of testimony meet. Doll’s memory is compromised by his admission that he invented Kruger’s later sufferings; the account of Peters, by contrast, situates his death within a stated prisoner total and a specific period.

The contrast also prevents the novel’s treatment of memory from settling into a single register. The camp is recalled as the setting of Doll’s personal participation in Kruger’s imprisonment, then invoked in the record of a mass death at the end of the war. Dachau consequently anchors both the perpetrators’ stories about what they did and the larger consequences that their stories cannot contain.