UK tour firm slammed for $3100 Adolf Hitler tour
By ANIMonday, January 10, 2011
MELBOURNE - A British tour company has been slammed over plans for a luxury 3,100 dollars package tour of sites relating to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Historians seem to be divided over the 30 members, eight-day trip, with some saying it will become a ‘perverse pilgrimage’, reports News.com.au.
The trip, scheduled for June and titled ‘Face of Evil: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’, has already been given a go-ahead by the German authorities.
The tour sites include the spot where Hitler committed suicide, the lakeside villa where the Holocaust was planned and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
The tour organisers are now at pains to point out that the trip is only for people with a serious interest in the history of the period, and that they will closely vet applicants to exclude neo-Nazis who may wish to join the trip.
“Just to make sure, we will even phone all the people wanting to come on the tour about their motives and interest,” said Nigel Jones, one of the tour leaders.
“We are serious historians with a track record,” he added.
But critics have claimed that the trip risked becoming a ‘perverse pilgrimage’ in honour of Hitler.
“German historians have confronted the Nazi past with seriousness,” said David Cesarani, a British expert on the Nazi period.
“But there is a danger of sensationalism when it is incorporated in what I’d call a holiday tour. If you focus on the sites most pertinent to Hitler, you are concentrating on the cult of that personality. The trip in effect becomes a perverse pilgrimage,” he added. (ANI)
