Scotland's first Dark Tourism conference to explore Holocaust sites as tourist draws

Running from 28 June to 1 July, the gathering will address how best to approach visits to dark tourism sites related to the Holocaust in particular. The conference will advocate the best way for such places to ‘practise’ this type of tourism, advising that they should confront history head on and be transparent in their curation.

Professor John Lennon of Glasgow Caledonian University is organising the conference alongside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Institute for Contemporary History in Berlin.

Lennon coined the term ‘dark tourism’ in the 1990s, referring to the innate human interest in places where extreme atrocities have been carried out.

"The 21st century tourist has a fascination with visiting sites of genocide, mass killing, extermination and incarceration," said Lennon. "Tourism is not separate from these ideas of atrocity; when people are on holiday in places like Krakow in Poland, Auschwitz which is nearby, is considered part of the package.

"Just like if you went to New York you might go to the Ground Zero site of 9/11 or the museum there to commemorate the people who died. This idea of visiting ‘dark’ places has become part of the fabric of tourism."

A spike in visits to concentration camps in 2015 reflects this enduring preoccupation with Nazi Germany. The country’s treatment of its controversial history is regarded as an exemplary exercise in how to sensitively and respectfully preserve and promote sites of killing as places of remembrance.

A small plaque notes the place of Hitler’s death in Berlin to avoid public speculation, but over a million people visit Auschwitz each year to experience unfiltered history first-hand.

Time is considered the biggest factor in determining when dark tourism can operate freely and when it is considered distasteful, Lennon said.

In 2017, Nazi Germany is chronologically distant to our everyday lives, and as this becomes the case for our more recent atrocities, tourists are showing increasing interest in a range of 'dark' sites the world over.

People make their way around the murals of Belfast which illuminated and defined the divisiveness of Northern Ireland during The Troubles. In the comfort of a London black cab their tour is made real with facts about murders, imprisonment and the peace process.

In Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, tourists make their way to the notorious Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Genocide museum. With just 30% of its population over 30, Cambodia is a nation still reeling from its bloody past.

Ghoulish signs across the countryside warn visitors to watch their step while walking through the sites as rain constantly unearths bones from mass graves not yet excavated. Hanging baskets swing cheerfully above a collection box for the museum's ‘much needed’ renovations. Not every place gets the tone right.

Dark tourism is not considered a new phenomenon - Auschwitz took on museum status in 1947, two years after it was liberated - but our increasingly commercialised lives mean that the way dark tourism sites are presented has an impact on how we interact with history, and can sometimes cause controversy.

Imogen Dalziel will be speaking at the conference, delivering a talk called Book Auschwitz: Get a free lunch. An expert in Holocaust studies, she critiques the use of death camps to prop up the tourism industry. "Holocaust sites are gradually becoming more commercialised by external companies, who cannot ignore the increase in tourists and try to profit from their visitor numbers.

"In small visitor shops opposite Auschwitz you can now buy souvenir plates, fridge magnets, thimbles and even crudité bowls adorned with images of both gates. TripAdvisor allows visitors to ‘rate’ and ‘review’ former concentration and extermination camps; some have given poor ratings on account of the camps being ‘too sanitised’ or ‘average'. As someone who is friends with Holocaust survivors, it can be frustrating to see tourists behaving in this way."

For those who were actually there and lived through the horrors of the Nazi death camps, this perceived trivialisation of their experiences is something which can cause distress and anger.

David Shapiro is a second generation Holocaust survivor, his wife Angela Shapiro, is a senior lecturer at the university and will speak at the conference to exhibit the testimonies of many survivors. 

Mr Shapiro's mother came to the UK from Vienna on the Kindertransport and his grandparents are suspected to have died on their way to Auschwitz, a place her son refuses to go

"For me there is no necessity, it wouldn’t add anything to my experiences. It all seems a bit ghoulish, looking at people’s hair and shoes and the destruction… it certainly isn’t a pilgrimage. My cousin used to run tours there from Israel and it was always something I struggled with.”

While places like Auschwitz and Cambodia's Killing Fields are scenes of the most shocking large-scale atrocities in history, the draw of dark tourism has also filtered down to smaller sites of tragedy.

The house of Fred and Rosemary West in Gloucester was demolished to stop souvenir hunters looting the site, and local authorities had to intervene to stop coaches diverting to Dunblane after the massacre of 16 schoolchildren and their teacher by Thomas Hamilton in 1996. In a chilling example of the mentality dark tourism can sometimes reveal, tourists have been spotted eating lunch at the grave of Holly Chapman and Jessica Wells who were murdered in Soham by Ian Huntley in 2002.

The dark side exerts a strange pull for many of us: detective novels, grisly thrillers, tabloid killers, TV dramas about murderers, natural disasters, visits to concentration camps. The truth is, we are curious about such places. Undeniably there is a horrible fascination, but most of all there is deep-seated need to understand not just the suffering that went on there, but also the depths of human evil that caused it.