Colin Philpott. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes. Volume 9, Issue 2, 2017.

It comes as a surprise to many people that so many of the buildings and public spaces created by the Nazis when they ruled Germany in the 1930s and 1940s still exist. The common misconception is that these relics of the Third Reich must have been destroyed at the end of the Second World War but, in reality, many are still with us. Moreover, the Third Reich sites in Germany and elsewhere constitute one of the most important groups of so-called “dark tourism” locations in the world, visited by millions of people every year (Lennon and Foley, 2010). How Germany has dealt with this and continues to deal with it today is a fascinating case study for many of the issues raised by the human fascination with visiting places associated with dark and shameful periods in history.

The Nazis were inveterate builders. Like many regimes, particularly dictatorships, one way they sought to secure their place in history and immortalise themselves and their ideas was through their architecture. They bequeathed a vast, largely unwanted, physical legacy to post-war Germany. Some of their buildings had been designed specifically as instruments of terror. Some were grandiose and built as statements. Some were functional and utilitarian. Hitler took a close personal interest in architecture and, aided by his loyal acolyte, the architect Albert Speer, built many and planned even more (Rosenfeld and Jaskot, 2008).

Inevitably, when studying the history of Nazi Germany, we are asking the question—how could this happen? How could a civilised nation allow itself to be taken in by such an evil philosophy? Much has been written and continues to be written about this but perhaps rather less attention has been given to an equally fascinating question—how did post-war Germany recover from such a catastrophic episode in its history and rediscover the core values of a civilised society, arguably as quickly as it had lost them?

The development of national rehabilitation for post-war Germans, both for those implicated in the Nazi era and the innocent generations who followed them, has involved coming to terms with the legacy of the Third Reich. This process is incomplete and still divides opinion. One, hitherto relatively unexplored, aspect of this is the physical legacy of the Nazis, their buildings, their structures and their public spaces. These locations were considered in detail for the book Relics of the Reich—the Buildings the Nazis Left Behind (Philpott, 2016) and were used to consider how Germany has dealt with this architectural legacy and what that tells us about Germany’s handling of the Nazi legacy more generally.

More than seven decades after the Führer committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, much of the architectural legacy left behind in 1945 remains with us. Nearly every member of the Nazi High Command died as the regime collapsed, either at their own hands or executed following the Nuremberg trials (Van der Vat, 1997). It is, however, perhaps symbolic that Speer, who controversially escaped the noose at Nuremberg, survived until 1981 like much of the architecture he created.

Immediately after the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945 with the dislocation, disintegration and division that followed, the fate of this architectural heritage was the least of Germany’s worries. Some of the sites most symbolic of the evil of the regime were destroyed by the Allies. Many buildings were pressed into service with new uses as the desperate quest for survival took priority. Others remained ignored by a nation preoccupied with a harsh, daily grind and embarrassed by the physical detritus of the Third Reich. Furthermore, the issue of the Nazi legacy, for several decades after 1945, became intertwined with the division of Germany and the playing out of the Cold War in that divided country (Sharples, 2012).

Studying this physical legacy makes for a fascinating journey, not out of some morbid curiosity for a dark period of history, but because it provides a clear sense of place; wanting to be there and wanting to tread where history was made are undeniable parts of the human psyche. The Nazi sites are often subdivided by Germans into the so-called “victim sites”, which were principally concentration camps or other places associated with the Nazi terror machine, and the so-called “perpetrator sites” (Rosenfeld and Jaskot, 2008). The latter being the locations associated with the government machine, party apparatus and propaganda of the Nazis. In a way, it is the latter group which is generally less well known and, in some ways, more problematic for Germany in deciding how to handle this difficult legacy. Preserving a concentration camp as a memorial to those who died and suffered there perhaps, paradoxically, raises fewer issues than preserving buildings that were designed principally to glorify the regime. The case study below will focus on the location which, perhaps above all others, illustrated this point—the Party Rally Grounds at Nuremberg.

Nuremberg: past and present

Nuremberg is a natural starting point for an examination of the buildings and spaces bequeathed to Germany by the Nazi regime. The Rally Grounds are one of the largest Nazi sites and arguably the most symbolic. It was probably the most important location in propaganda terms, and the rallies held there played a major role in strengthening the hold of the Nazis over Germany, in developing the cult of personality around Hitler and in showing off Nazi Germany to the world (Wilson, 2012). Along with a number of other places in the Nazis’ birthplace of Bavaria, some built and others appropriated by them, it is part of the narrative of how they gained and maintained power.

The tower blocks along the Beuthener Strasse on the south-eastern outskirts of Nuremberg symbolise the prosperity of twenty-first century Germany as a whole, and Bavaria in particular. The road towards the city centre bears to the right unveiling the telltale shape of a much older structure; passing behind the building, even viewed from the back, the distinctive outline of one of the most recognisable structures of the Nazi era is clear. From the car park beyond the far end of the building emerges its full-frontal view already familiar through viewing newsreels and hundreds of still images.

The visual experience for the visitor of the iconic remains of the grandstand of the Zeppelin Field at the Nuremberg Rally Grounds is both chilling and awe inspiring. There are enough significant remains of the vast grandstand, where Hitler addressed the faithful throng gathered for the annual rallies, to experience what it must have been like in the 1930s. More than 70 years on, aided by newsreels and widely distributed media imagery, it is possible to imagine the searchlights, the music, the speeches and the serried ranks of supporters gathering for what was the biggest annual set piece of the Nazi calendar (Wykes, 1969) (Plate 1).

The Zeppelin Field may be the image that comes most readily to mind when people think of the Nuremberg Rally Grounds, but it was only one part of a vast area of southeastern Nuremberg developed by the Nazis as their spiritual home. The city was chosen for two reasons: one symbolic and the other practical. This was the former seat of the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, which was seen by the Nazis as the First Reich (Grunberger, 1971). It was their belief that there was clear historical continuity in holding the rallies there. The practical reasons, however, were probably more important. Nuremberg was an important rail junction and a suitably central place for a gathering of large numbers of people from all over Germany.

The first Nazi Party rallies were held in Munich and Weimar but from 1927 onwards they took place in Nuremberg. Rallies were held there in 1927, 1929 and then from 1933 to 1938. The scheduled 1939 rally was cancelled at very short notice with the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September. One pre-existing building, the Luitpoldhalle, had originally been built for the Bavarian Exhibition in 1906 and was used for indoor meetings at the rallies, but the other main public spaces and structures were designed and built by the Nazis, predominantly by Hitler’s architect—Albert Speer (Wilson, 2012).

There were two main outdoor rally areas; the Luitpoldarena and the Ehrenhalle. The Luitpoldarena was used as the main arena for the 1927 and 1929 rallies and constituted a large open space which had previously been a park. Prior to the Nazis’ seizure of power, the City of Nuremberg had built the Ehrenhalle or war memorial at one end of the park to commemorate German dead from the First World War. The Nazis converted this parkland into an open arena and built a grandstand at the periphery. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, it was decided that the Luitpoldarena was inadequate to accommodate Hitler’s growing ambition to stage even more grandiose spectacles. Speer was commissioned to build a new, larger arena on the neighbouring Zeppelin Field, so called because Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin had landed one of his first airships there in 1909 (Wilson, 2012). The distinctive grandstand was around 350 m wide and the arena could hold over 150,000 people.

There were, however, many other parts of the Nuremberg Rally Grounds built, or in many cases partially built, during the 1930s as Hitler and Speer let their megalomaniac ambitions have full reign during the pre-war years. Perhaps, the most spectacular of all was the Congress Hall started in 1935 and planned as the party’s national conference centre with an eye-watering capacity of 50,000 seats. Like many of the Nuremberg projects, it remained unfinished. Similarly, plans for a giant German Stadium, envisaged by Speer as the largest stadium in the world and capable of holding 400,000 people, were never fully realised. Construction began in 1938 but was halted with the outbreak of war (Wykes, 1969). A further unfinished iconic structure was the Marzfeld—a parade ground for the German Army envisaged to be the size of eighty football pitches (Gregor, 2008).

There were three other main parts of the Rally Grounds complex. The KdF-Stadt (also known as the Strength through Joy Village) was created to the northeast of the Rally Grounds housing accommodation for people attending the rallies, as well as exhibition halls. An existing municipal stadium opened in 1928 was redeveloped as a venue for Hitler Youth events and sports activities. The Gro[beta]e Stra[beta]e (literally, the Great Road) was built and completed to link the two ends of the grounds. It was almost 2 km long and envisaged as a marching ground although was in fact never used for that purpose (Gregor, 2008).

This agglomeration of buildings and public spaces became the focus each year for the Nuremberg Rallies whose objective was very simple. They were a propaganda exercise designed to demonstrate to the German people the strength and determination of the Nazi leadership and to show the world, the unity of the German people under the Nazis. The rallies were full of ceremonial elements and sought to link Germany’s past, present and future through quasi-religious symbolism. However, in the speeches delivered at this location by the Nazi leadership (often at great length), the raw militarism, racism and terror that were the hallmarks of the regime were barely disguised. Leni Riefenstahl’s famous film “The Triumph of the Will” captured the pageantry and theatre of the rallies which, despite their sinister intent, were undoubtedly a triumph of organisation and choreography (Welch, 1993).

The Nuremberg Rallies played a crucial role both internally and abroad in the development of pre-war Nazi power. Perhaps, appropriately the story of what happened to this most iconic of Nazi sites after 1945 is a microcosm of what happened to the entire legacy of Nazi architecture after the collapse of the “Thousand Year Reich”. Parts of the Rally Grounds were damaged by war and then demolished. Other parts were deliberately destroyed as part of the denazification process. However, many were put to new use and remain operative today (Sharples, 2012). For Nuremberg, though, the fate of the Rally Grounds was part of a much bigger challenge—how to deal with the city having become a toxic brand. Nuremberg was, in many ways, the heart of Nazism. It was there that the Nuremberg laws stripping Jews of their rights were first declared. It was, and still is, a city particularly associated with the Nazis and, mainly for that reason, it was the city chosen by the Allies to stage the post-war trials of the Nazi leaders (Bessel, 2009). For more than 50 years before German reunification, it struggled to deal appropriately with the unwanted physical legacy left by the Nazis (Plate 2).

At first, whilst the victorious Allies were an occupying force, it was they who took the decisions on the fate of the Nazi sites. In April 1945, before the war was over but after Nuremberg had fallen to the advancing Americans, the giant swastika on top of the Zeppelin Field grandstand was blown up. The Americans used the Zeppelin Field as a sports field and as a parade ground and the grandstand was used for concerts and other events. The American evangelist Billy Graham preached there in 1963 (Gregor, 2008). However, after the grounds had reverted to the control of the City of Nuremberg the columns on the top tier of the grandstand were demolished for safety reasons, and the area of the Zeppelin Field became a racetrack (Taylor, 2011).

The Luitpoldhalle was severely damaged by Allied bombing in 1945, later demolished and is now a car park. The Luitpoldarena was returned to parkland in the 1950s and its Nazi grandstand was demolished; however, the Ehrenhalle, war memorial, remains. It is quite possible to walk round this part of the grounds without realising its sinister history. Part of the grounds became a housing estate and a conference and trade fair centre was built elsewhere on the site. The municipal stadium was refurbished several times and is the home of Nuremberg’s football team and hosted several games in the 2006 World Cup. The Nuremberg Indoor Arena opened in the grounds in 2001 (Rosenfeld and Jaskot, 2008). The predominant approach to the redevelopment of the Rally Grounds site for at least 20 years after the end of the war was one of pragmatism. As Rosenfeld and Jaskot (2008, p. 46) noted:

USA Army and City officials treated the site as little more than a convenient set of bleachers.

For many years after the war, there was a continuing reluctance to acknowledge the historical significance of the site. Nuremberg, as with much of the rest of Germany, had other preoccupations including rebuilding its city centre which had been flattened by Allied bombing towards the end of the war (Gregor, 2008). As elsewhere in Germany in the immediate post-war period, its focus on survival contributed to seeing itself as a victim. It was, the narrative went, a victim of a war that had been lost, a victim of unjustified Allied bombing and it also saw itself as a victim of Nazism (Rosenfeld and Jaskot, 2008) Alongside this, of course, was the uncomfortable fact that many people in power in Nuremberg and elsewhere in Germany after 1945 had Nazi connections. The process of denazification, including prosecutions against former Nazis, slowed and effectively stopped in the 1950s and many former Nazis were quietly assimilated back into public life.

Gregor (2008), in his study of the post-war history of Nuremberg, refers to how the citizens dealt with their own history in the 1950s and 1960s. At first, they wrote of the city’s history which, ignoring the Nazi period, harked back to Nuremberg’s earlier medieval glory. During the 1960s, the connection to the Nazi story was acknowledged but it was often presented as something that had been done to the city rather than with the active involvement of many citizens and certainly of its city council. Gregor (2008, p. 130) writes that in this way the Nazis were represented as outsiders who came there:

[…] for one week in a year to parade and hear speeches before departing again, leaving the ordinary citizens of Nuremberg to get on with their daily lives.

From the 1960s, however, attitudes changed. A younger generation, learning about the Nazi period in the German education system began to question the silence of the older generations (Gassert and Steinweis, 2006). As West Germany became economically buoyant and politically more self-confident, the possibility of dealing with the difficult legacy of Nazism became more realistic. In 1973, the Bavarian Land (regional) Government classified the Rally Grounds as an historical monument. Only in the 1980s were specific ideas put forward for dealing with the parts of the grounds that were the most visible relics of the Nazi period—the Zeppelin Field grandstand and arena and the unfinished Congress Hall.

The first real acknowledgement of the historical significance of the site was the staging in 1985 of a temporary exhibition inside the mosaic hall of the Zeppelin Field grandstand entitled “Fascination and Terror” (Gregor, 2008). Later, after reunification, the debate about a permanent acknowledgement of the history of the site grew in intensity. It was caught up in changes of political control on the city council and in the sometimes-tortuous relationship between the city and the Land government of Bavaria. In 1999, the Federal Government agreed to help fund the project and in 2001 a museum-style Information Centre, or Documentation Centre as they are known in Germany, was opened describing the role that Nuremberg played in the Nazi story. Symbolically, a single shard of glass cutting through the building was incorporated into the design to demonstrate the break with the past. In 2006, interpretation boards were placed at various points around the site explaining its history. It is notable that some 235,000 people visited the centre in 2014, of whom 40 per cent were from outside Germany. There are plans to extend the Documentation Centre which include the building of a research centre. Elsewhere in the city the Palace of Justice, scene of the post-war Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership, is still in use as a court and a permanent exhibition provides a full explanation of the Nuremberg trials (Plate 3).

Hitler and Speer espoused the theory of “ruin value” in their architecture (Van der Vat, 1997). This was the idea, which Speer claimed incorrectly to have invented, that buildings should be designed in such a way that they will leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins when they eventually collapse. This was all part of a belief that Nazi architecture would speak to future generations and demonstrate the grandeur and importance of Nazi ideas. In 2013, some 80 years after they were built, the structures of the Nuremberg Rally Grounds were in danger of collapsing. The City of Nuremberg estimated that around [euro]70 m might be needed to prevent collapse and make the structures safe (Paterson, 2013). Politicians from most parties in Nuremberg seem to support the expense which will need financial support from both the Bavarian and Federal Governments. Opposition exists, however, and prominent among those expressing concern about the plans is the eminent German historian Norbert Frei, who has argued that the buildings at Nuremberg should be allowed to crumble (Paterson, 2016).

Nuremberg, meanwhile, has managed to return this area of the city, at least in part to what it was before it was appropriated by the Nazis. It is once again a public open space; a “green lung” on the outskirts of the city. Whilst doing this, however, it has also acknowledged the historical significance of the site. As with iconic Nazi locations elsewhere in Germany it has, unsurprisingly, taken several generations for such a reconciliation to be possible.

At the commemoration in January 2015 of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the German President; Gauck (2015) recorded that:

There is no German identity without Auschwitz […] It is part and parcel of our country’s history.

Some years earlier, Angela Merkel had become the first German Chancellor in office to visit Dachau—the first Nazi concentration camp. She spoke of her “[…] sadness and shame” and condemned her fellow countrymen who had closed their eyes to the events of the 1930s (Vassagar, 2013). Statements like these by senior figures in the German political establishment demonstrate the level to which acceptance of the country’s continuing culpability for what happened under the Third Reich has now become part of Germany’s national narrative. As part of this, throughout the country, there are memorials, plaques, documentation centres and other ways of remembering at both “victim” and “perpetrator” sites associated with the Nazis.

This is not merely a question of preserving the Third Reich sites and, in many cases, building memorials or museums. Germany has also built completely new structures specifically to commemorate the victims of the Nazis, most notably the Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin or, to give it its correct title, “The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”. It was designed by Peter Eisenman and opened in May 2005—60 years after the collapse of the Third Reich. The 19,000 square metres site is covered with 2,711 concrete slabs and, underneath it, is an information centre containing the names of all known victims of the Holocaust (Plates 4 and 5).

The project was first mooted more than 30 years ago, but dogged with delays and controversy. It now stands right at the heart of the German capital, very much where the Nazi High Command operated, and in close proximity to the site of Hitler’s bunker. Walking between the concrete slabs of the memorial laid out on sloping ground provokes reflection not only about the Holocaust and its attendant horror, but also about the current German attitudes it arouses. The memorial represents a remarkable national statement of atonement and remorse. As MacGregor (2014) declares:

I know of no other country in the world that, at the heart of its own national capital, erects monuments to its own shame (op cot p 16).

Delineating the nature of Nazi dark sites

Political apologies for past national misdeeds have become fashionable with Britain apologising for some excesses of its colonial past, France for its treatment of the Jews under the Nazi occupation and a range of others for their roles in the slave trade. Post-reunification Germany would, nevertheless, appear to be a model for the demonstration of state repentance (Taylor, 2011). The journey taken, however, by what was, at first, two Germanys has been a long and tortuous one. In essence the fate of the Nazi sites studied by the author, and other sites of which they are representative, fall into three main categories.

The first of these are the places most associated with the genocide and the terror of the Nazis—most notably concentration camps, but also places like the Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin and the Wannsee House, where senior Nazis met to decide on the “Final Solution”. Of the estimated 15,000 camps established in all countries by the Nazis, many were destroyed either by the Nazis themselves or by the Allies soon after the war (Bessel, 2009). The Allies pressed a number of them into temporary service as camps both for prisoners of war, refugees and alleged Nazi war criminals and, in the case of ten camps in East Germany, as Soviet camps where thousands died in harsh conditions.

Seventy years on, though, a significant number remain as memorials and museums. The original impetus to preserve them as memorials was, in most cases, as a result of “victim pressure” often in the face of official opposition, particularly in Germany itself. More recently, however, that has changed and now most concentration camp memorials in Germany are supported financially by the Federal Government (Taylor, 2011). In addition, symbolic sites like Wannsee have been preserved and their role in the Third Reich story explained.

The second category is those sites associated with the German war machine—the factories, the U-boat pens, the rocket launch sites and the command bunkers. The fate of these is more mixed. Some are simply war relics no different to those found at military locations in other countries. As elsewhere, their future use was determined as much by pragmatic reasons as any other. Some U-boat pens, like the Valentin in Bremen, remain in military use; and some factories utilised for the war effort, such as the Volkswagen (VW) factory in Wolfsburg, remain but have been converted to peaceful ends (for further discussion see Philpott, 2016). Indeed, both at Valentin and Wolfsburg there is now acknowledgement of the suffering that occurred principally through the use of forced labour. Command bunkers mostly have either been left to decay below ground or were destroyed at or shortly after the war’s end. The Peenemünde rocket site is preserved as a museum principally for its scientific interest. These military sites seem to have been easier to deal with because they are less strongly associated with the specific crimes and, therefore, less imbued with the Nazi stigma.

The third main category covers those places specifically built by the Nazis as statements of their power, values and view of the world. These include the Nuremberg Rally Grounds, the buildings on the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, the sites built for the 1936 Olympics, new airports in Berlin and Munich, the party headquarters in various cities and the private homes and grounds acquired or built for the Nazi High Command. A mixture of factors has also been at play in determining the fates of these sites.

The swastika atop the Zeppelin Field grandstand at Nuremberg was symbolically blown-up by the Americans. The building and wider site survive partly as a historical relic, but also as valuable open space for Nuremberg—the original role of the area before its appropriation. These so-called “perpetrator sites” like Nuremberg, Berchtesgaden and Munich (which have also opened documentation centres) are perhaps the most interesting in demonstrating how a country can recount the history of its guilt and moral collapse. Most of the Olympic sites are still in use (Hilton, 2006). Tempelhof and Munich-Riem are no longer airports, not because of any association with the Nazi era, but simply because they were superseded by bigger, more modern airports. Many Nazi administration buildings have been put to new uses—perhaps most notably the Führerbau, where the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938 and which is now a music school. Although most homes of senior Nazis were deliberately demolished by the Allies, or later by the post-war German authorities, some do remain as private residences, including Albert Speer’s architectural studio near Berchtesgaden (Van der Vat, 1997).

The fate of this group of locations demonstrates the perhaps controversial point that architecture is not necessarily bad because it is Nazi architecture. It is difficult to describe the Olympic Stadium in Berlin as an unattractive building and many others were not dissimilar to contemporary buildings created elsewhere. Many British local councils built similarly stark but grand town halls in the 1930s. The post-war conversion of the Nazi holiday camp at Prora-Rügen on the Baltic coast into luxury holiday apartments represents a triumph of pragmatism over symbolism Philpott, 2016). More important than what has happened to Nazi buildings is why it has happened. Germany’s history of dealing with the physical remains of the Nazi era is, as we have seen, tied to its overall response to the time in question (Plate 6 and 7).

For many years only the victims, or their families, and survivors of the Nazi terror (and almost exclusively Jewish victims and survivors), pressed for proper acknowledgement of the significance of places where the Nazis had performed mass murder. For years, Germany largely turned a blind eye through a combination of factors. After the war, the utter totality of defeat and immediate physical and moral debris meant that dealing with the Nazi legacy simply was not important (Sharples, 2012). Survival was the priority and most Germans did not have the capacity, economically or emotionally, to concern themselves much with the sufferings and injustices which their country had inflicted on millions of others. They saw themselves as victims—victims of ferocious Allied bombing which had reduced their cities to rubble, victims of terrible food shortages and victims of the forced repatriations from the East (Bessel, 2009).

Later, the principal reasons for lack of action were political pragmatism, guilt and complicity. The generation in power in post-war Germany included many people who were implicated to a greater or lesser extent in the Nazi story particularly after the process of denazification slowed down. The Western Allies occupying Germany in the late 1940s largely lost interest in pursuing Nazi perpetrators as the priority was building up what became West Germany as a bulwark against communism and the Soviet Union (Bessel, 2009). As Germans themselves regained control of their government, many had been part of the Nazi regime and had no interest in raking over its era. Germany would almost certainly have been ungovernable had everyone with any level of Nazi complicity been excluded from public or political office (Gassert and Steinweiss, 2006). As a younger post-war generation challenged their parents in the 1960s and beyond, the Nazi era was opened up to greater examination and a process began of dealing with the period including the physical legacy of buildings and places. The continued division of Germany remained an obstacle because the Nazi legacy became a political football for the two states. East Germany portrayed the West as the successor fascist state to the Third Reich, and the West was more focussed on the evils of a communist dictatorship on its doorstep than one that had disappeared more than 20 years earlier (Taylor, 2011). Important also were differences within West Germany, which persisted after the fall of the Berlin Wall, between cities which felt more or less comfortable with their Nazi past—with Munich notably slower than elsewhere to acknowledge its role as the “capital of the movement” (Rosenfeld and Jaskot, 2008).

It was only after German reunification in 1990 that the process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung ” or coming to terms with the past gained real momentum (Taylor, 2011; Gassert and Steinweis, 2006). The generation that was most complicit in the Nazi story had mainly died, and there was an increasing willingness to tackle the difficulties of the era as the reunited country became politically and economically powerful again and imbued with growing self-confidence. Hence, there followed the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the development of documentation centres and other memorials and museums at both “victim” and “perpetrator” sites and a much more open and frank discussion about the Nazi legacy (Sharples, 2012).

An alternative interpretation is that the memorials and documentation centres suggest something other than a country which has come to terms with its complicity in one of the worst regimes in history. This strand of opinion sees documentation centres in Nuremberg, Berlin, Munich and elsewhere (and “Third Reich Tours”), as pandering to a questionable fascination with so-called “dark places” and suggests that benefits from exploiting any such tourism trade are morally dubious. They also consider the expense of [euro]70m to save the Nuremberg Rally Grounds from collapse to be complete anathema (Paterson, 2013, 2016). There is, furthermore, a lingering concern that overemphasizing Nazi sites, particularly the so-called “perpetrator sites”, could have a dangerous potential to encourage neo-Nazis.

A further issue is increasingly raised by those who question why there is so much continuing interest in the Nazi period and its associated crimes relative to the interest in documenting and dealing with the crimes committed under the Communist dictatorship, which governed part of German territory for over 40 years after 1945. Such criticism points to the crimes, particularly in Eastern Europe, under Soviet rule. The 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden in February 2015 also highlighted once again the continuing doubts about the legitimacy of Allied bombing of German cities towards the end of the war (Krol, 2015). These and other examples raise the question of moral relativism about the behaviour of different regimes and different countries.

There is, of course, no simple correct or erroneous view. This author’s experience of visiting many Nazi sites in Germany leaves little doubt that, overall, Germany is a country handling its difficult past seriously and with a degree of critical reflection that is admirable. Germany has agonised over its Nazi legacy. The memorial sites are solemn and chilling and no-one who visits Dachau or Auschwitz can fail to be impressed by the simple commemoration of multiple victims that these places now offer. Visiting documentation and evidence centres in Nuremberg, Berchtesgaden, Berlin and elsewhere illustrate that there is no attempt to explain away or exculpate. There may well have been a mixture of motives in the decisions that led to the opening of these centres; however, they remain an “honest” attempt to describe places of significance in German history to people within and beyond Germany.

The Nazis did not have a monopoly of terror, and human history is sadly littered with repugnant regimes. It will remain vital, however, that the story of how Germany became the Third Reich, and the ensuing catastrophe, is told for future generations. The history of the buildings and spaces where that story unfolded is a crucial element in ensuring that the tragedy is understood and never repeated.