ABSTRACT
The town of Dachau lives in the shadow of its terrible past, known for its association with the Nazi regime and as the place of the former concentration camp. Although town officials have attempted to market the town’s cultural and historic features, visitor numbers for Dachau’s other sites have been a fraction of those of the memorial site/concentration camp. Using a quantitative intercept survey, the aim of this chapter is to investigate the reasons why tourists visit Dachau and consider what such findings mean for destinations with ‘dark’ history and pejorative place names. The study utilises a mixed-methods approach, triangulating a literature review, a pilot intercept survey and a number of key stakeholder interviews. The findings explore the relationship between Dachau’s various identities as a town, a Holocaust site and tourist destination, and the impossible legacy it carries. Throughout the chapter, the term ‘dark tourism’ will be used as a general term to refer to the visitation of sites associated with recent death, disaster and atrocities, and KZ (the German abbreviation for ‘Konzentrationslager’) will be used to denote ‘concentration camp’.
