Review by Shelley Baranowski, University of Akron. Published by H-German (H-Net Reviews, October 2006)

    Hardly a month goes by, especially in Germany, without controversy as to how the Third Reich, its sites of horror, its artifacts and its victims, should be commemorated. The recent debate over the exhibition in Schwerin of the works of Hitler's favorite sculptor, Arno Brecker, is but one example. Because commemoration is at least in part supposed to educate the public about the Nazi past, debates arise over what message, or messages, such exhibits or memorials should convey. On the one hand, knowledge about the Third Reich should prevent a recurrence of Nazism. Yet on the other, the official messages of deterrence embedded in museums and documentation centers are not the only meanings that arise. As scholars of tourism have recently argued, tourists are hardly blank slates, who in uncomplicated fashion swallow what promoters of tourism transmit. Indeed, places of memory, particularly in the case of Nazism, are often explicitly designed to contest alternative readings of the past that their visitors might implicitly share...
    As a guidebook, Steven Lehrer's Hitler Sites is most explicitly directed to tourists, especially Americans, who according to the author would find it difficult to locate important markers of the Nazi regime from most travel guides. An associate professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York who has written a previous work on the house where the Wannsee Conference took place, Lehrer's city-by-city guidebook traces the places associated with Hitler's birth and early life in Austria, his emigration to Munich shortly before World War I, his leadership of the fledgling Nazi party afterwards, his rise to power and subsequently his rule of the Third Reich. Although places of importance to the Nazi hierarchy are included (an example being Hermann Göring's Brandenburg estate, Carinhall), Lehrer focuses primarily on the Führer. Generously illustrated with appropriate references following each entry, the book argues that tourism to Nazi sites "can furnish insights into Hitler and Nazi Germany that are difficult to obtain in any other manner. The visitor comes away with a more profound understanding of who and what Hitler really was" (p. 2).
    Presumably because Lehrer's attention is drawn to sites in which Hitler was physically present, tourists, or more generally readers, will not find entries for the death camps, most of the concentration camps, or major war sites for that matter, except for the West Wall, Compiègne and Paris. The closest one comes to the eastern front is via the author's entries on Hitler's field headquarters. Nevertheless, there is plenty here to keep even the most determined World War II buff occupied, beginning with Hitler's birthplace in Braunau am Inn and the well-tended graves of the Führer's parents outside Linz and concluding with the neighborhood in Queens, New York, where Hitler's half-Irish nephew Willie lived, having made his living during the war through speaking engagements in which he attacked his infamous uncle. Unlike most guidebooks, Hitler Sites provides an extensive bibliography of English and German sources, including many German newspaper articles, which support detailed and competent descriptions of each place. Even if one lacks the resources or inclination to follow Lehrer's tour from start to finish, this is a well-informed and handy reference.
    Consistent with the purpose of guidebooks, however, Lehrer intends to educate tourists, or more precisely direct them to places that will (with the aid of the information that the author provides) produce the appropriate appreciation for Hitler's ferocious brutality, as well as that of the Nazi regime. Thus, readers learn relatively little about the controversies surrounding many of the sites or the multiple meanings associated with them. To be sure, allusions to conflicts arise now and then, such as Lehrer's reference to the recently constructed documentation center in the Obersalzberg as a response to the efforts of neo-Nazis to peddle Hitler hagiography (p. 155), or the author's conclusion to his entry on Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia ("Wolfschanze"), which transmits the promise of the present owner not to turn it into a "Hitlerian Disneyland" (p. 182). Nevertheless, Hitler Sites imparts a didactic confidence that tourists will absorb the appropriate lessons, so much so that the author feels no need to explain how or why Hitler sites are better teachers of the historical realities of Nazism than other sources. Perhaps Lehrer assumes as much from an American audience, for whom Nazism carries less baggage...