A Hitler Holiday: Is the Nazi Sightseeing Tour Taking Things Too Far?

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Busts of dictator Adolf Hitler are pictured at the media preview of the exhibition "Hilter und die Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft und Verbrechen" (Hitler and the German Nation and Crime) at the Deutsche Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum) in Berlin October 13, 2010.

REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Two British historians are leading an eight-day luxury tour of Nazi and Third Reich sites in Germany.

For $3,200, participants will visit key Hitler-related sites including the lakeside villa where the plans for the Holocaust were laid out, Hitler’s vacation home in Berchtesgaden, Sachsenhausen concentration camp and the bunker where Hitler committed suicide.

(More on TIME.com: Read about the restoration of Holocaust violins.)

The tour, “The Face of Evil: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” is intended only for serious students of the Nazi leaders, say the tour’s leaders, Nigel Jones and Roger Moorhouse. Both have published books on Nazi Germany, and the two say they will question each participant before the tour to evaluate motivations for joining the group.

British historian and critic of the planned tour David Cesarani told the Sydney Daily Telegraph that he was troubled by the tour’s focus on Hitler. “If you focus on the sites most pertinent to Hitler, you are concentrating on the cult of that personality.”

(More on TIME.com: Read about how Google Archive is digitizing Holocaust documents.)

Evidence of a rise in Hitler scholarship can be found in Germany’s first museum exhibition on Hitler, which opened in October and has recently been extended, due to popular demand.

Ukrainian officials also recently announced plans to convert the Nazi’s eastern headquarters, where 6,000 Soviet soldiers died, into a tourist attraction, set to open on May 9 on Victory Day Over Fascism. (via USA Today)