The question researched in this paper is: How does location affect the way World War 2-re-
lated dark tourism destinations see and present themselves and their historical subjects to
visitors?
The paper deals with dark tourism and WW2 destinations and discusses how museums and
memorials see themselves, how their exhibitions and websites look, etc. The paper also dis -
cusses the differences between how museums and memorials in different locations present
the same or similar historical events to their visitors.
The paper itself contains several main chapters and a short introduction with an explanation
why I have chosen this subject. In the chapter about philosophy of science I present myself
and my academic viewpoints. Then comes the methodology chapter discussing the ap-
proaches I have taken for the paper and the literature on the subject and explaining the way I
have worked and gathered data and knowledge for the project. Then there is a chapter
presenting and discussing the concept of “dark tourism”, and placing the museums and me -
morials I have worked with in this paper on a scale, pointing out how dark or light these des -
tinations are (the darkest places are the ones where genocide has happened and the lightest
ones are fun entertainment parks where no actual killing has taken place). In the next chapter
I present the main theories used in the paper. These are Fairclough’s discourse analysis and
Pauwels multimodal framework for analysing websites. The theories have been used for get-
ting in-depth knowledge and understanding about the individual museums and their work.
The next chapter contains my analysis of the data collected from the four researched mu-
seums and memorials (Fort VII in Poznanń, Poland; The T4 memorial in Berlin, Germany; The
Bernburg Euthanasia Centre in Bernburg, Germany; and Besættelsesmuseet in Aarhus, Den -
mark). The final chapter is the conclusion, summarizing the knowledge that I have gathered
through the process of working with the paper, answering the research question as well as all
the additional questions that have arisen in the process. The conclusion also includes a little
paragraph about the relevance of this paper for other companies.
The data for this paper has been gathered in several different ways: from personal face-to-face
interviews through analysis of exhibitions to analysis of websites and additional texts. The data has been collected in several different countries, making the paper somewhat interna -
tional and intercultural, which I see as one of its strong points. The world is getting smaller,
and we all have to think more about how we present our messages, both on-line – on websites
– and off-line. Wrong content in a website will affect the number of visitors to a place or a
company, how much money the company can earn and also how many people hear the mes -
sage the organisation is interested in spreading. The wording will influence the people visiting
the website or location and can mean a lot for both their understanding of the information
presented, their attitude towards the company, museum, memorial, history and society in general.