It was an uneasy partnership for Otto Rahn; later, he explained his SS membership to friends in the following way: "A man has to eat. What was I supposed to do? Turn Himmler down?" Journeys for his second book led Rahn to places in Germany, France, Italy and Iceland. Openly homosexual, frequenting anti-Nazi circles, and having fallen out of favour with the Nazi leadership, Rahn was assigned guard duty at the Dachau concentration camp in 1937 as punishment for a drunken homosexual scrape. He resigned from the SS in 1939.