Auschwitz museum draws nearly 2 million visitors in 2025

More than 1.95 million people visited the site of the former Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland last year, a 7-percent increase from 2024, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum said.

Entrance to the former Auschwitz death camp with the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free) sign.

Photo: Bibi595, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The museum's attendance record was set in 2019, when 2.32 million visitors toured the site.

Polish citizens accounted for about one-quarter of visitors in 2025. The largest numbers of foreign visitors came from Britain, followed by Italy, Spain, Germany, the United States, the Czech Republic, Israel and the Netherlands.

'Growing disinformation'

The museum employs about 340 guides who offer tours in 20 languages. Museum director Piotr Cywiński said around 90 percent of visitors chose guided tours.

“At a time of oversimplification, superficial information and growing disinformation, learning the history of Auschwitz with a guide is of particular importance," Cywiński said.

He warned that online spaces have increasingly been flooded with false images, videos and content about Auschwitz and the Holocaust generated by artificial intelligence, calling it "a very dangerous phenomenon."

In 2025, 1.95 million people visited the site of the Auschwitz Memorial, which represents a 7% increase compared to the previous year.

About 23% of visitors originated from Poland. The subsequent largest groups were from the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany, the United… pic.twitter.com/7NAnQoj76V

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 7, 2026

“That is why we are calling on social media platforms, above all Facebook, to adapt their rules so that the publication and spread of such content is not possible,” he said.

According to museum spokesman Paweł Sawicki, more than 34,000 people—mostly from abroad—participated in conferences, seminars and study tours organized by the museum in 2025.

The museum also offers guided virtual tours in seven languages through its “Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes” platform.

More than 3 million people follow the museum’s content across social media platforms, with Facebook seeing the fastest growth in 2025, gaining more than 300,000 new followers.

A bilingual podcast series, On Auschwitz, is available on major platforms and has been played more than 3 million times across more than 60 episodes.

PODCAST | The first crematorium and the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz

From the beginning of the existence of Auschwitz camp, the bodies of murdered prisoners were incinerated and this work had to be done by prisoners. Listen to our podcast about the beginnings of this special work… pic.twitter.com/qqbuxuiCHw

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 6, 2026

More than 1.1 million people—mostly Jews, along with non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war and people of other nationalities—were murdered at Auschwitz during World War II.

January 27 will mark the 81st anniversary of the camp's liberation by the Soviet Red Army. The date is observed worldwide as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

(mk/gs)

Source: PAP, Auschwitz Museum