ABSTRACT
Driving past Dachau, people's children did not seem to notice what was glaringly obtrusive and problematic for Margaret and the author: just outside the perimeter wire there stood a graceful little eighteenth century church, freshly painted and with a typical central European onion dome on the top of its tower. Perhaps it was significant that it stood outside the camp. In most Western prisons the chapel is inside, signifying a religious involvement in what goes on in prison. Dachau was the first concentration camp to be established by the Nazis, almost immediately upon their gaining of power in 1933. It was not at the beginning an extermination camp - that came somewhat later, but as a logical development of the purposes for which Dachau was established. Dachau was designed and built to make a very different statement, and to be the prototype of a ruthless instrument for carrying through the grand design of the Nazis.
