© action press/Nicolas Datiche/SIPA; Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP via Getty Images
More and more people visit scenes of war, genocide or natural disasters. The reasons for this "dark tourism" are complex.
The contaminated ruins of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the house of the "Hollywood murderer" Charles Manson, the Killing Fields of Cambodia - gloomy sites of all kinds exert a great fascination on visitors. And it's growing, as a look at the visitor numbers shows. The Auschwitz Memorial, for example, reported a new record with 2.3 million visitors in 2019, an increase of 170,000 compared to the previous year.
What is behind it – historical awareness and curiosity? Or is it
