A record number of people from around the world visited the former Nazi camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau in 2019.
A report on the Auschwitz.org web site said 2,320,000 people visited the sites, located in southern Poland and administered as a state-run Museum Memorial. That’s about 170,000 more than in the previous record-breaking year — 2018.
It said that according to data provided by the visitors in the online reservation system, in 2019 the Memorial was visited by at least 396,000 visitors from Poland, 200,000 from Great Britain, 120,000 from the USA, 104,000 from Italy, 73,000 from Germany, 70,000 from Spain, 67,000 from France, 59,000 from Israel, 42,000 from Ireland and 40,000 from Sweden.
However, said Andrzej Kacorzyk, director of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust:
these data are not complete, because, in relation to the 730,000 visitors who came to the Memorial in international groups, the organisers of the trips did not declare a particular country. Consequently, we are undertaking actions aimed at making the statistical data more detailed through the electronic system for booking entry cards.
Fewer than 500,000 people visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in the year 2000. Some 1.53 million visited in 2014.
The web site said that social media use had also sharply grown, with more than 900,000 followers the Museum’s account on Twitter, more than 300,000 on the Museum’s profile on Facebook, and 80,000 on Instagram.
That represents a big increase over 2016, when nearly 230 thousand persons followed the Memorial Museum’s Facebook page; more than 30,000 followed on Twitter, and 22 thousand on Instagram.
The dramatic increase in visitors has created logistics, security, preservation, and other challenges for administrators of the Museum Memorial. The mass tourism has also put strains on fragile infrastucture.
Admission to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial is free. But over the past few years, new measures and visit regulations have been implemented aimed at coping with the sharp increase in visitors. These are explained on the Visitors web site, where people can book their visits (up to three months in advance).
Further new terms and conditions came into effect January 2, including the introduction of personal Entry Cards for group tours, aimed at “eliminating trade in Entry Cards by some businesses that brings visitors to the Memorial.” Each booking – both individual and group – will now require providing data of participants.
‘For some time now, we have seen cases of profiteering of entry cards, as well as the flooding of the online system of the Museum with a huge number of “unnecessary in-advance” reservations. We also know that a kind of grey market of wholesale entry cards has developed, to the detriment of individual visitors,” said Museum Director Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński.