Holocaust tourism

Main track of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Permanent exhibit at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Holocaust tourism is tourism to destinations connected with the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust in World War II, including visits to sites of Jewish martyrology such as former Nazi death camps and concentration camps turned into state museums.[1] It belongs to a category of the so-called 'roots tourism' usually across parts of Central Europe,[2] or, more generally, the Western-style dark tourism to sites of death and disaster.[3]

The term Holocaust, first used in the late 1950s, was derived from the Greek word holokauston meaning a completely burnt offering to God. It has come to symbolize the systematic extermination of approximately six million European Jews by Nazi Germany in occupied territories from 1933 to 1945.[4] The term can also be applied to mean the estimated five to seven million non-Jewish victims who were murdered by the Nazis in the same time period.[5]

  1. ^ Schwabe, Alexander (January 27, 2005). "Holocaust Tourism: Visiting Auschwitz, the Factory of Death". Der Spiegel. Hamburg, Germany. Retrieved 11 August 2015. The tourist hotels of Krakow lie just one hour away from the world's most horrid place: Auschwitz. Close to 600,000 visitors come to the death camp every year. Among them are former prisoners, religious Jews and descendants of the dead. For everyone, it is a trip laced with pain.
  2. ^ Qureshi, Yasmin (July 27, 2011). "Holocaust memories and 'roots tourism' in Eastern Europe". Mondoweiss. Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  3. ^ Isaac, Rami Khalil; Çakmak, Erdinç (2013). "Understanding visitor's motivation at sites of death and disaster: the case of former transit camp Westerbork, the Netherlands". Current Issues in Tourism. 17 (2): 1–16. doi:10.1080/13683500.2013.776021. S2CID 55027449.
  4. ^ Holocaust museum Houston, Terms Related to the Holocaust. Archived 2017-07-01 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved August 11, 2015.
  5. ^ Friedlander, Henry (1995). The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. p. 191. ISBN 978-0-8078-4675-9.