As a newcomer on a short stay I had a cell to myself. But since it was cold at night and there were no blankets, I would have welcomed a little human warmth around me. Breakfast was coarse rye wholemeal bread and ersatz coffee. Dinner was bread and potato gruel. The latrine was a ditch with a plank laid across it, and you were obliged to shit in the company of nine other prisoners at any one time. Once, a guard sawed through the plank and some of the prisoners ended up in the cesspit. At Columbia Haus they appreciated a sense of humour.

I had been there for six days when one night, at around midnight, I was ordered to join a vanload of prisoners for transport to Putlitzstrasse Railway Station, and from there to Dachau.

Dachau is situated some fifteen kilometres north-west of Munich. Someone on the train told me that it was the Reich’s first KZ. This seemed to me to be entirely appropriate, given Munich’s reputation as the birthplace of National Socialism. Built around the remains of an old explosives factory, it stands anomalously near some farmland in pleasant Bavarian countryside. Actually, the countryside is all there is that’s pleasant about Bavaria. The people certainly aren’t. I felt sure that Dachau wasn’t about to disappoint me in this respect, or in any other. At Columbia Haus they said that Dachau was the model for all later camps: that there was even a special school there to train S S men to be more brutal. They didn’t lie.

We were helped out of the wagons with the usual boots and rifle-butts, and marched east to the camp entrance. This was enclosed by a large guardhouse underneath which was a gate with the slogan ‘Work Makes You Free’ in the middle of the iron grille-work. The legend was the subject of some contemptuous mirth among the other prisoners, but nobody dared say anything for fear of getting a kicking.

I could think of lots of things that made you free, but work wasn’t one of them: after five minutes in Dachau, death seemed a better bet.

They marched us to an open square which was a kind of parade ground, flanked to the south by a long building with a high-pitched roof. To the north, and running between seemingly endless rows of prison huts, was a wide, straight road lined with tall poplar trees. My heart sank as I began to appreciate the full magnitude of the task that lay before me. Dachau was huge. It might take months even to find Mutschmann, let alone befriend him convincingly enough to learn where he had hidden the papers. I was beginning to doubt whether the whole exercise simply wasn’t the grossest piece of sadism on Heydrich’s part.