Fearful Photos of Dark Tourism Worldwide

Museums and memorials around the globe reveal stories of death, of dignity, and of destruction.

In June 1944, Nazi troops marched to the quiet village of Oradour-sur-Glane (in German-dominated France and gathered 642 villagers in the square. The men were taken into barns, and the women and children were locked up inside the church before they set them on fire. Those who were not defeated by burns or drowning were hit while trying to escape fire.

Historians believe troops targeted the village after receiving information that residents there were involved in the Resistance. In 1946, the French government declared it a national memorial, writes National Geographic.

Tool Sling is a portrait of cruelty. Photographs of weakened corpses wear rooms on a wall of massacres, and clotted blood stains ceilings ʹ evidence of systematic arrests, torture and slaughter of Cambodian civilians during the reign of Khmer Rouge. Decades after having played an integral role in one of the worst mass killings of the 20th century, the former detention center now invites tourists inside to explore the history of violence.

The scene in Tool Sling is not unusual. Each year, millions of so-called dark <x0urists” flock to the memorials of war, the sites of natural disasters, and prisons of the past around the world to witness what remains of their tragic past.

The Auschwitz concentration camp was deployed by German authorities in 1940 in the suburbs of O dealt with a halt by stopping the Poles in mass arrests. From 1942 it was one of the largest networks of Nazi death camps where prisoners were subjected to forced labor, inhuman medical experiments and mass killings. State Museum.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is a memorial and museum dedicated to the memory of those killed in the camps, about 1 million and a hundred thousand people during World War II.

In 1982, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon after years of tension. In response, a newly formed group of militants, Hezbollah, financed a guerrilla campaign against offensive.

Thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands were displaced during the 18-year occupation, which finally ended in 2000 when Israel withdrew its troops. The Resistance resort opened in 2010 in Mleeta, a strategic military base for Hezbollah, to commemorate Israel's 10th anniversary of its withdrawal.

On May 12th 2008, a massive earthquake rocked the mountainous region of Sichuan region in southwest China. Whole villages and cities were destroyed by a quake of 7.9 magnitudes. Nearly 90 thousand people were killed, including over 5300 children, and millions were displaced from their homes. A memorial sculpture opened in 2009 in front of a high school in Yingxiu, an earthquake anchor. The hour of granite reads 2:28 B.m., when the quake began.

Torture and execution were common in Carrosa Prison, near Liepa, Latvia, which had been used as a Nazi and Soviet military prison for most of the 20th century. Military prison has since been turned into museums, where visitors can look at life behind bars and stay overnight.

In April 1986 a series of mistakes at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union resulted in the worst nuclear disaster in history. A series of explosions removed the cover of reactor number four, releasing a cloud of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Winds scattered dust on Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, leaving millions of acres of polluted land. Over 100 thousand people were evacuated and radiation-related diseases continue to affect those who were exposed to high levels of nuclear material. The ghost city of Pripyat, Ukraine, is designated uncertain for human settlements for a period of 24 thousand years.

In 1975, Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia, launching a bloody genocide that claimed the lives of some 1.7 million people. In a radical effort to create a non-class society, people were stripped of titles and assets and were forced to do heavy work on a community farm in the suburbs. Those who were not satisfied with sickness and hunger were imprisoned and tortured at execution centers like Tool Sling. About 17 thousand prisoners went from the former high school to prison and ended up buried in the murder fields outside Phnom Penh.

Between April and July 1994, members of the Hutu ethnic majority in Rwanda slaughtered nearly 800 thousand people and raped a quarter of a million women in a violent oppressive campaign to wipe out the Tutz minority. After the massacre, nearly 2 million Husus fled to Tanzania, Burundi, and Zerah (Democratic Republic of Congo) for fear of revenge, further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. The genocide memorials in Rwanda preserve and show the remains of the dead.

* Ambroise photo Tézenas has documented dozens of major dark tourism sites around the world in his book “I've been here: Image of Dark Tourism”