Most have some sort of free will donation boxes, or if large enough have upkeep funded through grants or private donations.
I visited the Anne Frank House last year and it didn’t feel at all like a profit was being made from the Frank family’s misfortune. It wasn’t cheap, 16 Euros, but every space was immaculately maintained and her story was sensitively presented.
In summer, tickets get sold out quickly and one needs to be aware of the release window when tickets become available for a visit 6 weeks later. Right now, the next available tickets are for January 4, 14 days from now.
I lived a couple of kilometers from the Nagasaki Peace Park so I visited there many times.
I’ve been to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum as well.
City trash people come out and unceremoniously shovel all the stuff into a garbage truck. Same as cleaning up after a festival in a park.
Depending on how “hot” the site still is, this may be done in the wee hours to minimize anyone seeing what’s done.
I don’t particularly seek out or avoid such sites. Maybe I’m too analytical, but seeing the place doesn’t make the past event any more or less real.
On a very minor note, there’s a small airport near here with Cessnas and bizjets, but no airlines. A year or so ago a light piston twin crashed near the airport, killing the IIRC 3 people aboard. They went in nearly straight down.
I drive past the impact spot every weekish on the way to something or other nearby. The only “memorial” is a line of ~50 foot tall ~3’ diameter palm trees in the boulevard median. One of which is now sawn off flat at the ground after the plane crunched it and it crunched the plane. There’s no marker there. If you didn’t already know why that tree was missing, you’d never find out. But I do. Sometimes I give a “There but for the grace of …” thought. Sometimes not.
It’s a good example of “the presence of absence” which is a common theme in various deliberate memorials.
On my way to a fly-in in Quebec, I visited Johnstown, Pa. After driving around, and checking out the dam site, I found a free camping place. As the sun went down, I lay there in my tent and heard a roar which I assumed to be the wind, even though I don’t remember it being windy. It started off quiet, built into a crescendo, and then just died away. It was easy to imagine it being the roar of an immense wall of water. Do floods have ghosts?
My scientific brain wondered if, in mountainous country, the air could cool down in the evening and roll downhill. I’m from flyover country, so I wouldn’t know 
The City Hall town square of my hometown, Alexandria VA, was a slave market for much of the antebellum era.
Virtually every John Mohammed/Lee Boyd Malvo murder on the east coast occurred in a neighborhood I used to live in, one in a shopping center I frequented both before and after in Bailey’s Crossroads. I knew the guy was from out of town, because every site was an uncomplicated drive to 95 or the Beltway. I would love to know what Mohammed’s beef with Michael’s craft supplies was.
I’m planning a trip to the DMZ at Panmunjon next month.
It’s an interesting question that I confess I haven’t thought deeply about. I do think I perform some sort of imprecise mental calculation where I weigh the significance of the tragedy against what I might get out of seeing the locale. I think there are some spots that, no matter how horrific the tragedy, being there makes it settle in you in a way that simply reading about it can’t. There are other places that would amount to nothing more than being able to say, “I saw where that happened,” and I don’t know that there’s anything to be learned.
Since Hiroshima has been brought up, I’ll use my experience as an example. We had a tour of the “town center” and the museum as part of a cruise ship stop. Our intent was to do the tour, then go off the beaten path and find some little izakaya for lunch and then wander the nearby streets and see what we see. In the end, we were both just so overwhelmed and saddened by what we saw, that we didn’t do much for the rest of the afternoon but sit in our cabin and talk. It really did make the whole thing…“real,” in a way that it hadn’t been before. It sank in deep.
I have not yet visited any of the concentration camps or other Holocaust memorials or museums. I honestly don’t know if I could handle it. This May, we’re going on a Civil Rights “pilgrimage” to Selma and Birmingham, and I suspect it is going to wreck me. But, I think some of this stuff is too important, and already too much in danger of being glossed over or minimized, to not engage with it as much as I can.
When my parents and I visited my uncle in Berlin for a week in 2005, I made it a point to visit the Plötzensee memorial, the former Nazi execution site. I never had had the opportunity to see a memorial site of nazi atrocities before, and it made a deep impact on me. The place was properly curated with displays and charts and other info, and though it never was meant to be a “horror attraction”, neither by me nor the curators, but as a site for remembrance, the still existing meat hooks the bodies of the terror victims had been hooked on gave me the chills. IIRC, there was no entry fee.
I am not American, but I found it extremely doable 18 years ago, with no knowledge of Japanese, no guide and no Google help. It should be even easier now. You see few people, and the memorial/museum is peaceful.
The Japanese we met had a strangely relaxed attitude, we took pictures of them with their cameras while they made the V like victory sign (I still don’t understand) and they took pictures of us with our camera.
Nagasaki was almost empty:
I had to think about the bombing of Tokio, where more people were killed in one night (and there were several bombing nights) than in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, perhaps even combined. I saw no memorial for that when in Tokio, but it is a big city and I may have missed it.
Concerning the Nuremberg trials the International Organization of Conference Interpreters has co-organized an exhibition commemorating the trials and the interpreters who helped with the procedures (in English further down):
I have visited several Nazi memorial sites, usually as an interpreter, when a visitor needed my services. There are many in and around Berlin. When the visitors had a connection with what had happened there it was particularly hard, but it was also usually well and respectfully done. Germans have been practising for many years, they (we?) are good at remembering respectfully. I hope we don’t forget.
Amen, brother!
I generally don’t either, unless they are part of the attraction I’m visiting. For example, the staircase where the princes may have been murdered, and the site of the chopping block, both in the Tower of London.
But once, when my wife and I were taking a road trip through the Canadian Maritimes, we were exploring around Halifax: Lunenburg, Peggy’s Cove, the touristy stuff. We came across something that looked out of place among the green fields and forests and seacoast and quaint houses between towns. We stopped to take a look.
It was the memorial to Swissair Flight 111, which had crashed just offshore, in St. Margarets Bay, in 1998.
A couple years ago during a trip to France we drove through some of the WWI bombing sites near Verdun.
It was eerie to see those rolling craters grown over with grass so many years after the events.
It blows my mind that there are still parts of France that remain uninhabitable due to all the toxic leftovers from the war and unexploded ordnance.
I’ll admit that while in a Paris a few months ago, I sought out the site of the guillotine during the Terror where Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Danton, and Robespierre were executed. All there was to mark the location was an easily missed plaque in the ground near the Egyptian obelisk.
Sometimes I’ll visit the locations of bad events in the news, like sensational murders, by looking up the address on a real estate website. Not because of the likelihood of the place soon being on the market at a discount, but just out of vulgar curiosity.
Unlike people, dogs like to visit sites of past good events, such as Labrador retrievers revisiting a spot where someone dropped a sandwich or hot dog years before.
I’ve been to Japan once, with part of the trip including a few days in Kyoto. I’ve been a fan of the Nobunaga’s Ambition video games since the first one was released in the 80s, and I wanted to visit the spot where Oda Nobunaga died. It was on some random corner in a commercial area of Kyoto. It wasn’t marked, and most of the people in the area that I asked had no clue about the event or the exact location.
One I haven’t seen mentioned in the Halifax harbour explosion site. I think I visited a historical marker for it.
One more just occured to me. About two months ago I in the vincinity of Altadena, Calfornia and decided to drive through the neigborhood that was burned in the Eaton Fire nearly ten months earlier. It looked like a war had been fought there - really horrific. About a quarter of the houses were still there but were damaged beyond repair. There were a large number of blocks had been cleared of debris, leaving behind only foundations, concrete driveways, and a few block walls.
I enjoy visiting sites of historical significance. Some of those events were good things, others not so much. But one of the most eerily moving ones was when I visited the Shiloh National Military Park, site of the Civil War battle, many years ago.
My son and I were traveling through Tennessee on our way to visit my mother in Texas for Thanksgiving and arrived at the park just before the visitor center closed for the day. We drove the loop doing the self-guided audio tour as the sun was going down. As the twilight progressed a misty fog started developing in the open spaces of the battlefields. Through that fog we began to see the ghostly gray shapes of hundreds, if not thousands, of white tailed deer quietly on the move. It truly seemed as though the spirits of the vast number of soldiers who lost their lives in that place had returned (or never left)! I was deeply moved by the experience, and to this day still feel the presence of the lost souls of such places whenever I visit them.
I’ve been to both a concentration camp & a death camp (Auschwitz); the latter being the main purpose of a multi-day side trip from Dresden before my event. A visit to the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor. Trips to the 9/11 memorials in NYC & Shanksville & even to the TWA flight 800 memorial, though that one was a stumble-upon. All of those had organized memorials/tours so one could learn about/remember the event &/or ‘pay your respects’ to the people who died there.
I’ve also been to a number of national cemeteries (their uniformity is impressive over hundreds/thousands of headstones) & have looked into the names of a few random headstones that caught my eye for whatever reason.
One of the most powerful photos I ever took was of a woman, the only person in a section sitting at a grave; presumably her father, who was killed in Vietnam. I had a big lens & got one shot from far away where I was able to read the tombstone. I will never share that photo. I took another one where the focus was on a much closer tombstone so she & the person she’s mourning are blurred just enough to have anonymity.