Chapter 9 Reshaping Dachau for Visitors : 1933 - 2000

Even though, since the 1970s,Auschwitz has eclipsed Dachau as the most widely recognized symbol of Nazi atrocities, the Dachau concentration camp museum remains by far the most visited original site associated with Nazi Germany. With the annual number of visitors rising from ca. 100,000 in the early 1950s to peak at just under 1 million in the late 1980s, the Dachau memorial site museum ranks among the top five most-visited museums in Germany. With foreign tourists consistently comprising well over 50% of those visitors, state and local officials have long been concerned about the impressions visitors gain at the site.As this chapter will show, their attempts to shape visitors' experiences by reshaping the site were misguided more often than they were successful. From the early 1950s until the mid-1980s the Dachau site was repeatedly sanitized of authentic historical substance, but those reductions proved ineffectual in modifying visitors' preconceptions and expectations. As the site once again undergoes extensive modification at the turn of the millennium, the redesigners' failure to consider their predominantly young audiences' relationships to the historical events appears to be leading to yet another ineffectual, top-down form for the memorial site.