10 Important World War II Sites That All Travelers Should Experience

When she turned 13, Anne Frank received a diary as a gift, which is now one of the most popular books in the world, and shortly after, her family went into hiding from the Nazis. The Diary of a Young Girl is an account of the two years she spent in the cramped secret annex in a house in Amsterdam. The young Jew, her parents, and elder sister, along with four others, were discovered in 1944 and sent to concentration camps. Only Anne’s father, Otto Frank, survived. He published his late daughter’s diary and her dream to become a writer came true. 

The secret annex now attracts millions of visitors every year. The Anne Frank House opened in 1960 as a museum and has on display Anne’s diary. There are also personal items, like the map Otto Frank had on the wall to track the Allies progress.

Auschwitz was the largest Nazi concentration camp and extermination site. Here, 1.1 million people were murdered between 1940 and 1945–around 1 million of them were Jews. Poles, the Roma people, and Soviet prisoners were also killed. Located in a small Polish town, Oświęcim, the camp was once used as army barracks by the Polish. After the Nazis occupied Poland, they turned the site into prisons and later developed gas chambers at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. More sub-camps were built that used prisoners as slave labor and the ​​Auschwitz III-Monowitz was the largest of them all.

Today, it’s a bone-chilling museum that shows you the horrors of humanity. You can visit Auschwitz-I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where you’ll see the gas chambers, personal belongings left behind by those who were brutally murdered (shoes, talismans, garments), and archival documents and works of arts by the prisoners. 

On June 6 of this year, the 77th anniversary of the Normandy landings, the British Normandy Memorial opened. It is dedicated to the 22,442 people who died on D-Day and the ensuing battle under British command.

D-Day was the biggest amphibious invasion in history when around 160,000 British, American, Canadian, and other Allied soldiers landed on five beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Over the next 77 days, they had total control of Normandy. The victory changed the course of the war and the troops went on to liberate Paris. 

There are 160 stone columns with names of the fallen inscribed on them, a bronze sculpture of charging infantrymen, and a monument dedicated to French civilians who lost their lives. The memorial overlooks Gold Beach, one of the landing sites, and cost £30 million to build.

The sprawling National WWII Museum in New Orleans has six buildings that narrate the stories of the war. There is so much on this six-acre campus, from exhibits on the history and production of war machines to personal accounts of those who were impacted. 

Every aspect of the war is covered. You can learn about why it started, how it was fought (with more than weapons), and how it changed the world. The museum features archival footage and narrations (including Beyond All Boundaries, narrated by Tom Hanks), a pavilion dedicated to STEM research that helped win the war, and exhibits theatrically taking visitors to Normandy, Tokyo, and Berlin.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed the naval base of Pearl Harbor and killed 2,400 people. The USS Arizona exploded and sank, claiming 1,177 sailors who were on it. All in nine minutes. It is still submerged underwater and remains a war grave, a resting place for those Marines who couldn’t be recovered. And decades after the attack, it continues to leak oil.

The USS Arizona War Memorial is built over its remains and is accessible by a boat. Visitors come to see the white arched structure of the memorial and the wall that has inscriptions of those who perished in the attack. Diving in the waters and looking at the wreckage is also possible, but because it’s a revered war grave, divers can’t go inside the ship.

You should also take time out to visit the Battleship Missouri Memorial—you can walk on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri, where the official surrender ceremony took place on September 2, 1945. A beginning and an end to the U.S. campaign.

The Imperial War Museums are comprised of five museums throughout England that have documented wars and conflicts since World War I. In Manchester, you can visit IWM North to learn how war affects people—there’s a special exhibit here where men and women describe what life was like during World War II. In London, you can see the Churchill War Rooms, a group of basement offices where the British government ministers and strategists, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill, carried out the planning of the war. 

The museums also run the We Were There program with people who have lived through these conflicts and share them with visitors. These museums also exhibit modern-day conflicts including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and more.

Close to the Brandenburg Gate, 2,711 concrete slabs of varying heights stand in an area of 19,000 square meters (204,500 square feet). This is a memorial dedicated to the six million European Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. It opened in 2005, decades after the atrocities took place. It’s not a typical memorial—the design is intended to be uneven and wave-like and the memorial itself has been criticized. But walking through the labyrinth of gravestone-like slabs is an unnerving experience and the design tries to evoke confusion and chaos, taking inspiration from the turbulent time in the history of the world. 

Underneath the open-air memorial is an information center, where you can see videos from the extermination sites and hear the voices of the survivors.

You can also visit these World War II sites in Germany to understand the extent of the tragedy.

The end of the Second World War was also terrifyingly tragic. America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan—the first one on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the second one on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. More than 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima by the blast and 74,000 in Nagasaki–but the true death toll is considerably more, as many died in the following weeks, months, and years due to the nuclear radiation.

In Hiroshima, the Atomic Bomb Dome was the building located underneath the explosion, but it wasn’t destroyed completely. It still stands today as a reminder of the suffering and a monument of world peace. You should also visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Flame of Peace, Children’s Peace Monument, and the Cenotaph for Atomic Bomb Victims.

The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum exhibits first-hand accounts of the people who survived the bomb as well as belongings from the victims. The museum, along with the Nagasaki Peace Statue and the Nagasaki Peace Park, reminds us of the dangers of war and promotes world peace. 

These sites in Japan aim to educate people about nuclear weapons and continue to discourage their use.

Yad Vashem is Israel’s largest memorial dedicated to the Holocaust, established in 1953 as a campus, archive, and museum. Within the complex is the Holocaust History Museum, which has 10 halls, including the Hall of Names, memorializing three million names of Shoah victims in a haunting circular room. There is also a children’s memorial, the Hall of Remembrance that burns an eternal flame, and the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, with 2,000 trees commemorating non-Jews who risked themselves to save Jewish victims.

The fall of Singapore in 1942 to Japanese forces was a big blow to the British Empire, which colonized and governed the nation. The Kranji War Memorial is located close to the place where the Japanese first landed and launched an attack. The prisoners at Kranji had started a small cemetery, which is now the resting place of 4,461 casualties from the Commonwealth—the white gravestones lined up to remember people from Singapore, India, Canada, Australia, Malaya, Britain, New Zealand, and the Netherlands who died during the War. It also has a mass grave of 69 Chinese servicemen who were killed by the Japanese. The site also has a Singapore Memorial with more than 24,000 names of those who have no known grave.