More than 800,000 people visited the Memorial Museum at Dachau last year. This was the largest number of visitors annually to the museum which is situated in the former concentration camp site near Munich, reflecting a continuous trend since 1975 when 452,000 visitors were recorded.
Bacbara Distel, the museum’s director, said that although the German public’s interest in the museum has been constantly growing, the majority of visitors are from abroad. For many years there were few visitors to Dachau, and Germans were a small minority of the visitors. But since the screening of the American NBC-TV series, “Holocaust,” in West Germany in 1979 there has been a remarkable increase in the number of visitors, especially school children, Distel noted.
The museum was established by former prisoners, members of the International Dachau Committee. It is now maintained by Bararia’s Castles, Museums, Gardens and Lakes Administration.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
