Image of quote: As one of the few journalists permitted to tour the government’s new internment camp, about 40 miles from the southern border, the New York Times correspondent tried to be scrupulously fair. Forcing civilians to live behind barbed wire and armed guards was surely inhumane, and there was little shelter from the blazing summer heat. But on the other hand, the barracks were “clean as a whistle.” Detainees lazed in the grass, played chess, and swam in a makeshift pool. There were even workshops for arts and crafts, where good work could earn an “extra allotment of bread.” True, there had been some clashes in the camp’s first days—and officials, the reporter noted, had not allowed him to visit the disciplinary cells. But all in all, the correspondent noted in his July 1933 article, life at Dachau, the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany, had “settled into the organized routine of any penal institution.” from Jonathan M Katz’s article in Salon, “Not Every Concentration Camp is Auschwitz”