Auschwitz Museum attracts over 2 mln visitors in 2018

Over 2.15 million people visited the former Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz, in southern Poland in 2018, the Auschwitz Museum wrote on its website on Friday. This is almost 50,000 more visitors than in 2017.

Poles constituted the largest visitor group (405,000), followed by Britons (281,000), Americans (136,000), Italians (116,000), Spaniards (95,000), Germans (76,000).

The past year saw an especially marked rise in visitors from Portugal (with an increase of 36 percent), the Museum reported. The number of visitors from China and Israel dropped by 23 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

Specialised educational projects constitute an important part of the Museum's activities. Last year, over 17,000 people took part in programmes organised by the International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

The Auschwitz extermination camp was opened in 1940, its second site Birkenau two years later. Auschwitz consisted of a main camp and 40 sub-units, where the Nazis killed over 1.1 million people, mainly Jews, Poles, Roma and Soviet POWs.

The camp was liberated by the Soviets on January 27, 1945.

In 1947, the camp site was declared a national memorial site.