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Pascal was Bavaria-born; he was used to impossibly picturesque towns, and Dachau certainly fitted that description.

Red roofs, onion domes, gabled houses painted in pretty pastels.

An elegant palace sitting on the top of a hillside which burst into flowers in the spring.

Dachau was so picture-postcard perfect that – according to the guidebook someone had left in the officers’ mess – it had once been a haven for artists who had flocked to the town to paint its buildings and stunning landscapes.

Pascal doubted any artists would want to paint it now.

Pretty houses or not, Dachau was no longer simply a picturesque Bavarian town.

The camp on its edges had stolen its name and become a byword for the kind of terror no visitor would come to see – and no inhabitant wanted to know about.

Challenging might be a good way to describe it.

Pascal winced every time the words he’d used to Noemi about the camp came into his head, which happened on an almost daily basis now that he knew its real face.

He didn’t know if he’d been arrogant or naive or – and he hoped this was the truth – he’d been trying to stop her worrying about her parents when he’d skated over Dachau’s miseries, but he loathed that he could so easily have done it.

He loathed a lot about the man he’d been then.

‘The site’s an old munitions factory, although it’s expanded a lot since the first camp was opened here in thirty-three.

There were less than a thousand prisoners in the first year; now there’s a base level that’s twenty times that.

There’s a lot of Poles here, but not so many Russians as there were – we had a whole army of them a couple of years ago, but the SS despatched them quick enough.

There’s Jews, obviously, although we’re working our way through those too.

Scum basically. The ones who are fit enough are put to work in the factories on site here, or at the sub-camps.

If they’re too weak to be of any use, and taking too long to check out, there’s a handy shooting range a couple of kilometres away.

Or we can use the euthanasia centre at Hartheim if we’re getting backlogged.

You’ll get the hang of the rest of it. Just make sure you remember discipline is kept deliberately tight – they jump when we say jump.

Not that many of them could actually manage to do that. ’

Pascal had spent his first windswept day in the camp in October 1943 being taken through an induction programme by a brute of a man which had almost eaten through his stomach.

And wearing the SS uniform which went with his new post, a uniform that – in an irony he couldn’t share with anyone – no longer felt like an honour to put on but a casing his skin did not want to touch.

That day, and all of them since, had required him to act a part he’d never have guessed at fourteen – when his heart was full of love for the Führer, and his head had blindly followed it – he’d ever be called on to play.

Not that anybody watching him would have guessed he was struggling; he played his part far too well.

He’d admired the camp commandant’s whitewashed villa and the neatly kept SS residential compound that day as if it was perfectly normal for elegant homes to occupy the same space as stinking and overcrowded barracks.

He’d nodded at the guard towers and the electric fence – which was, according to his guide, ‘a great source of sport on a dull afternoon’ – with the same blank expression he’d used to note down the processes by which the inmates were stripped of their dignity.

He’d done everything very well indeed. Until he’d come face to face with a squad of rain-soaked and skeletal prisoners shovelling ash from the crematorium into the long fire pits which edged the far side of the camp, imagined Noemi among their number and wondered at what point he’d go mad.

Which would have been easy to do and would have been one way out of this. That, or the alternative.

Pascal shifted the weight of the gun at his hip, remembering how often he’d sat staring at it in his first few weeks, considering the alternative to the post he’d been assigned.

Trying to summon up the courage to turn himself into a target.

Challenging . There were so many regrets he had about Noemi, so many things he wanted to apologise and atone for, and that word was high on the list. He should have said cruel or inhuman .

He should have said it was one of the worst places on earth, whatever the Nazis pretended about the camp’s importance as a place of correction.

There is only one path to freedom.

The slogan painted on the roof of the building which housed the camp’s kitchen and laundry was impossible to miss, which was the point of it.

So were the nine milestones that the prisoners needed to follow to attain that enviable state, which were also painted there, including hard work and obedience and love of the Fatherland.

Except the truth, as Pascal and every inmate knew, was that the only pathway to freedom in Dachau was death, and there was no shortage of ways to find that.

The prisoners – who he’d managed to confirm from the files had included Hauke but not Frieda – succumbed to starvation or typhus in their thousands.

They were shot, or overworked, or beaten until there wasn’t an unbroken bone left in their bodies.

Or, if the numbers were small, sent to Hartheim to be despatched by lethal injection.

Or Auschwitz if the numbers were big. And once they were gone?

They were replaced by the trainload, and the cycle of cruelty and ill-treatment and murder went on.

Where does this end?

That question had hit Pascal like a second bullet when he’d discovered Auschwitz written next to Hauke’s name.

He’d been as sick in his office bathroom that day as if he’d swallowed poison.

And now he could no longer turn away from the answer – not that he wanted to.

He’d seen it in the pits at Doli Pivski.

He’d seen it a thousand times bigger in Dachau.

It ended with mass murder on an industrial scale.

But it cannot end with cowardice or self-pity.

For the first few weeks, Pascal had stared at his gun in despair and thought that the cycle couldn’t be broken.

He’d thought he couldn’t continue as a witness to the regime’s horrors and certainly not as an overseer of one of its brutal camps.

But then he’d caught his breath and looked up.

He deserved to feel shame, and he deserved to feel guilt.

But the people whose lives he’d pretended were nothing to do with his deserved more.

‘Do you have a moment?’

Pascal slid the pile of work permits he’d been up since dawn signing under a folder on his desk as his office door opened and Captain Rohmer – one of his fellow compound leaders and a man who thought closed doors didn’t apply to him – walked in.

Pascal hated him. Rohmer’s favourite pastime was extending a roll call until a prisoner collapsed, so he could punish an entire barracks’ worth of inmates for hiding a sick one.

He found the man a smile anyway because a smile and a ready ear served his purpose.

Like the mountain brigade, the SS officers who formed Dachau’s command staff and oversaw the camp’s daily life were a tight unit, bound by comradeship and shared beliefs.

Most of the younger ones had come from other work camps or had been recruited from the guard unit’s lower ranks.

The oldest had been part of the SS in its earliest days and had been rewarded with an office job and a healthy salary for staking their loyalty so quickly.

They all viewed tolerance as a weakness and ruthlessness as their duty.

Prisoners were there to be degraded; their lives held no value.

Weapons were always kept loaded. Although Pascal held the same rank, his background meant he wasn’t one of them, but it soon became clear that wasn’t the black mark it could have been.

Instead, his past, or the edited parts of it which were common knowledge, became a story he’d turned to his advantage.

Despite his fears, his actions at the Doli Pivski massacre hadn’t followed him to Dachau, although his fellow officers had investigated his background as far as they were able.

They’d ferreted out that he was an alpine brigade man, that he’d trained at the fabled Garmisch barracks and fought in Russia and the Balkans.

And that he’d been wounded at the Battle of Sutjeska, a conflict which had already taken on mythic proportions.

That had impressed them. Once one of them unearthed the Mount Elbrus photograph with his name printed underneath it, Pascal stopped being an oddity and became a living legend.

Every attribute that had raised eyebrows on his arrival suddenly strengthened the hero’s narrative Pascal didn’t want, but had gradually learned was both a blessing and a workable disguise.

He was taciturn and aloof because that was the way of the mountain men, not because he was overwhelmed by the horror of his new surroundings and how he was meant to act there.

He kept to himself because he was a lone wolf, not because the other officers’ brutality sickened him.

In another irony Pascal couldn’t escape, he’d never hated the regime more, and he’d never been such a trusted part of it.

Or more determined to use that to his advantage.

‘What can I do for you, Rohmer? What’s giving you grey hairs so early today?’

Rohmer didn’t waste time on pleasantries – he never did.

‘We need a complete sweep of the camp. I’ve been reliably informed someone’s been smuggling medicine in – presumably via a work placement. We need to catch whoever’s responsible and make examples out of them.’

Making an example of inmates was Rohmer’s other favourite pastime, next to holding punishing roll calls.

The man was endlessly inventive when it came to devising new ways of torture.

Making a group of prisoners dance beside the electric fence until they overbalanced and fell into it was his latest foray into camp entertainment.

Pascal loathed him with a passion none of the other officers knew he possessed.

But he wasn’t about to reveal any trace of that now, not when a sweep of the camp was shorthand for a mass execution that – with a little care and a little time – he could at least partially prevent.

He nodded to Rohmer as if nothing could be easier.

‘Of course. I’ll get my block leaders on the case and make sure the word is passed round to the other commanders.

Although the sweep itself will obviously have to wait until later – we can’t do anything that will impact on today’s workforce, as I’m sure you agree.

Reliable information or not, none of us, especially the commandant, have time to deal with aggrieved factory owners who’ve been left without workers.

Let’s hold off until evening roll call, so we can make alternative arrangements for tomorrow if, as you say, widespread punishments are required. ’

Rohmer wasn’t particularly happy with the response, but there was nothing he could do about it. The commandant wasn’t a patient man at the best of times, and he wouldn’t thank any of his staff who caused him to be accused of hampering production lines.

Pascal picked up a folder as Rohmer reluctantly agreed and managed to hold himself calm till the man left, although his heart was racing.

Rohmer was a notoriously lazy man who was fond of his home comforts and the shortest hours he could work; he’d go off the idea of a night-time sweep within an hour.

But he won’t delay forever. Which means I have today to prepare as many more work permits and transfers as I can, and warn everybody who needs warning.

He pulled himself together and took another sheaf of blank forms from his desk drawer.

The Mühldorf sub-camp needed more men to hollow out the tunnels where the next generation of Messerschmitt fighter planes were going to be built.

The bunkers under excavation at Kaufering also required more labour.

He’d had those requests on his desk for a few days, which meant he could move prisoners from his compound to both those places and no one would question him doing it.

Pascal reached for his pen and his embossing stamp and began writing.

Neither solution was ideal. The men he transferred would be safe from a sweep, but safe was a relative term.

The work he was sending them to do was dangerous, the likelihood of an injury was high and there were no medical facilities at either sub-camp.

Given the high mortality rates and the expendability of the workforce, the rations and living conditions were likely to be worse than at Dachau.

But both places offered a better short-term chance of survival than staying put, and sometimes one chance was enough.

It was late by the time he finally completed the task – hiding away all day and devoting himself to it wasn’t an option.

The camp was quiet; there’d been no word of an air raid.

Once evening roll call was done – and that passed, as Pascal had expected, without any interference from Rohmer – all that was left to do was to carry out an unscheduled barracks’ inspection.

No one would question that either: he’d be commended for his diligence if anyone noticed.

Which made it the perfect cover for Pascal to meet with some of the prisoners he’d already persuaded to trust him.

The meeting would be quick and limited to a small core.

Then it would be up to them to spread the message for people to stay on their guard until they could be moved, without alerting the inmates who were in the Gestapo’s pockets, not his.

And to make sure that the medical supplies Pascal had been smuggling into his compound – to save lives and win trust – since the previous December were very carefully hidden.