Monumental Nazi-era buildings in Germany

Monumental Nazi-era buildings in Germany have become tourist magnets. These sites, associated with the Nazis, have different ways of dealing with their heritage, but is it "dark tourism" or educational tourism? 

 Every 10 minutes a new group of guided tourists stops at the spot on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, where Adolf Hitler killed himself in 1945. There is no visible trace left of the underground bunker. These days there is just a cemented area next to the "Peking Duck" restaurant, making it probably the most photographed parking lot in Berlin.

Tourists from the United States, in particular, want to see the "Führerbunker," says Sabine, a city guide in the German capital. But people of other nationalities also seek out the place. The "Führerbunker" drew people's attention as early as 1945 when it was an unwelcome attraction located in the former Soviet sector of divided post-war Berlin.

When it became part of the former East Germany, the bunker was almost completely demolished. All that remained were parts of some walls and the foundation. When these were discovered during excavation work in the 1990s, Berlin's city council decided after long discussions with historians, politicians and archeologists to keep the remains out of sight. It was argued that the remains were too fragmented and that no money should be invested into a site that might attract extreme right-wing groups.

Nevertheless, it has remained an attraction for tourists. "Some tourist guides have invented some outrageous stories about this place," says Holger Happel, a member of the "Berliner Unterwelten" (Berlin Underworlds) association. The group focuses on underground architecture and offers tours of and documents underground locations like shelters from the Nazi and Cold War eras, disused subway train tunnels and brewing cellars. There are no tours to the "Führerbunker" because the association aims to also demystify such places, says Happel, adding: "In 2006, we managed to persuade the authorities that the least they could do is erect a board conveying the most basic information in locations like that to put a stop to the invented stories."

 Holidays in shadows of others' suffering

Spots with a dark history attract tourists the world over, but visitors aren't always looking to be informed. Since the turn of the century, a new trend has emerged: tour organizers and cities have extended their tourist activities to places associated with historic horror and suffering. The Institute for Dark Tourism Research (iDTR) at the University of Central Lancashire in Britain, which was founded in 2012, says dark tourism is any travel associated with death, suffering, murder, pain, disaster or the macabre. These days there are actual tours of the manmade disaster site of Chernobyl in Ukraine, which include measuring radioactivity with a Geiger counter and lunch on site. It's also possible to crawl through the tunnels in Sarajevo that were dug during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Other popular destinations include places associated with mass killings like Idi Amin's torture chambers in Uganda. Many of these historically relevant sites are more than willing to take tourists' money, but not all of them provide information or historical background that put the spot's past in context.

Rüdiger Hachtmann, a historian and professor at the Technical University of Berlin, says "dark tourism" tends to focus on relatively recent events. Participants' emotions range from pity to voyeurism and from horror to greed at witnessing something sensational and dark.

"Similar to, but also the exact opposite of, "dark tourism" is the politically motivated educational tour," Hachtmann explains, adding that tourists many want to confront these dark chapters of history not just emotionally but, most of all, intellectually. "It is conceivable that "dark tourism" might encounter 'culturally motivated educational tourism' at one of the Nazi era memorials, such as a tour to the former Auschwitz death camp." But he adds that "hopefully the intention to understand what happened will be the dominant motivation among most tourists.

Source: http://www.dw.com