The Bavarian concentration camp memorials had fewer visitors last year than in the first year of the pandemic. In the summer months of 2021, almost as many people came to the former concentration camp in Dachau as before Corona, according to a survey by the Evangelical Press Service (EPD) on the upcoming Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th. However, the memorial sites remained closed for almost the entire first half of the year. This led to further decreasing numbers.
Although the Dachau concentration camp memorial site does not carry out a general visitor count, it has confirmed this trend. According to projections, around 900,000 people a year visited them before the pandemic. In 2020, this number fell sharply, and in 2021 the flow of visitors was “unstable and still affected by the pandemic,” it said. From the summer of 2021, however, many visitors came again. Between July and mid-November, bookings by school classes and the number of foreign individual visitors were “felt at the pre-corona level”.
Unfortunately, there was no lack of anti-Semitic incidents at the memorial sites
The corona-related downward trend was also observed nationwide: while around 700,000 visitors came to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial in 2019, there were only around 100,000 people in 2021.
Due to the lack of opportunities to be present, all memorial sites in Bavaria expanded their online offerings. In Dachau, a wide variety of formats were tried: there were a total of 31 Facebook Live tours in three languages, digital seminars on the topic of “Football in Dachau Concentration Camp” and virtual commemoration with live streams. For the first time in 2021, digital contemporary witness talks took place. According to the press office, the digital offers were well received and were popular precisely because of the low-threshold opportunities for interaction.
Even if a lot was missing last year, there was unfortunately no lack of anti-Semitic incidents at the memorials. In Dachau, for example, there were letters with inciting content, graffiti with a swastika on the information board at the former SS shooting range in Hebertshausen, and an incident involving two tourists from Finland who gave the Hitler salute in front of the historic entrance to the Jourhaus and took photos of themselves.