I have recently been traveling extensively through the mountain villages of Crete, and so many have memorials to the deaths of local residents during WWII. In some villages all the men and boys were rounded up and killed. Even the food culture here records stories of foods that are bittersweet now because they were foods of survival during the war. This is not to mention the absolute holocaust of Greek Jews. At the same time, there are many German tourists here and very often websites for Cretan resources are presented in Greek, English, and German. This has really made me wonder how on earth the people of countries so damaged by Germany ever began to accept Germans as visitors, and how Germans had the confidence to go as tourists.
I can offer a bit of (partial) information about the return of German tourists in France after 1945.
German people, in the decade following WW2, were not much able to travel for a simple reason: the "economic miracle" had yet to materialize, and they had other priorities, such as the reconstruction of their households. From V-Day to the currency reform of June 1948 that took place in the Western occupation zones, German economy was dominated by barter and black market. While the reform had positive effects, people lost their wartime savings. In 1950, an average middle-class German family of four could only spend about 7% of its budget on leisure, recreation and entertainment: the rest of the budget was used for food, rent, heating, power and essential transport (Kopper, 2008). Vacations, if they were feasible, were taken at home or domestically. In addition, the German tourist industry had been thoroughly destroyed. In the early 1950s, it was still about one-third the size it had been in 1936 (Kosha, 2000). It is thus not suprising that the numbers of German visitors (tourists and business) were extremely low in the late 1940s. British statistics show that there were 55000 German visitors in the UK in 1938: they were 1000 in 1946, 8000 in 1947, 18000 in 1948 and 20000 in 1949 (vs 87000 from France the same year).
It was possible for Germans to go to France in the immediate postwar if they had a good reason to do so that was not "leisure", such as business, administration, or academia. In August 1945, Jesuit priest and former Resistance member Jean du Rivau founded the Franco-German magazine Documents/Dokumente with the purpose of advancing the cause of Franco-German reconciliation. Rivau organized a first meeting of French and German intellectuals in Offenburg, Germany in 1947, and then another one in Royaumont, France in October 1948. Among the German participants were Joseph Rovan, Eugen Kogon, Walter Dirks, and Elisabeth Langgässer, who all had been opponents to the Nazi regime (Kogon had spent the entire war in Buchenwald), which certainly gave them proper credentials to visit France (Plum, 2007). They were not "tourists", but it shows that the French border was not closed to "good" Germans.
Another type of German visitors who were the first to arrive were catholic pilgrims. A German delegation went to Lourdes in 1947 (Courtabessis, 1947) and, two years later, four trains departing from Cologne, Munich, Hannover, and Mainz, transported 1200 German pilgrims, a cardinal and a bishop to Lourdes (Combat, 14 July 1949; L'Aube, 20 July 1949). In 1950, German visitors in Paris were business people (27%), functionaries (31%), and academics (25%) (Carrefour, 25 July 1951).
In 1951, France authorized Germans to get tourist visas. The money they could spend was limited to 500 DM + 100 DM for automobile drivers (this limit was raised in 1953, and removed in 1959). The first "official" German tourists spent their time in Paris, Lyon, and the Riviera. Numbers of German visitors grew steadily, from a mere 25,000 in 1949 to 400,000 in 1955, reaching 732,000 in 1961, more than British tourists. Half came by road and 35% by train. They were poorer than British and American tourists, with two-third of German tourists staying in 1-star and 2-star hotels vs 49% for the British and 28% for the Americans. Group visits resumed in 1954 (Ginier, 1963). By then, the German economy had been revived, and its tourist industry was working again, with German tour operators sending people abroad by thousands. In 1958, more West Germans traveled abroad than foreigners visited the Federal Republic (Koshar, 2000).
How were German visitors received in France? An article from 1951 (Carrefour, 25 July 1951) presents German tourists in a gently mocking way ("The Germans have always been very fond of France. In their own way, of course..."). A cartoon shows a (male) German tourist looking at the Eiffel Tower, at Mona Lisa, at a can-can dancer, and then running (lusting) after a woman. The article describes the tourist attractions preferred by the Germans: museums, religious sites, the Eiffel Tower, music halls, and prostitutes. Concerning the latter, the article recommends that the German tourist presents himself as a Swiss citizen: French prostitutes, while loving foreign customers, are not fond of German ones. The article ends by presenting German tourists as discreet and self-effacing, preferring wine to beer, and avoiding to be identified as German. It concludes:
In general, he is held by hoteliers, taxi drivers, restaurant owners, transporters, to be "exact, clean, correct and very disciplined". The war is already far away...
According to Wackerman (1994):
The Germans, satisfied on the whole with their stay in France, although often below expectations as regards the quality of the service and the tourist offer in general, still complained repeatedly about the coolness of the welcome in the shops or in the street, the psychological barriers being tenacious in all categories of the population and all age groups; in young people, a "thawing" or the absence of rejection was nevertheless noticed.
Genier (1963):
[The German tourist] does not appreciate the excessive prices charged by a hotel that is questionable for its cleanliness and the vulgarity of its staff. Finally, he would gladly exchange the evening meal, which is too copious, for a modern and better lit room!
From these short and incomplete presentation, it seems that German tourism was normalized rather quickly in France, basically as soon as Germans were able to afford vacationing abroad in the 1950s. France, of course, was counting on foreign tourists, including German ones, to recapture its position as the Number 1 tourist nation in Europe, which it had lost in the late thirties (Commissariat Général du Tourisme, 1950). The fact that there was more than 700,000 German tourists in 1961 is an indication that they were relatively well received, with the older generations of French people being somewhat colder to them than the younger one. There were occasional slumps (the Suez crisis in 1956, events linked to the Algeria war) but otherwise German tourists enjoyed going to France, and some even came to revisit the places where they had been stationed during the war (Genier, 1963).
Sources
This is an interesting question, as a follow up, could a German citizen travel the world directly after the war on their passport?
If I was a German citizen early post war, could I go to New York and see the Statue of Liberty?
A cool little fact, the town i live in in the UK was the first town to twin itself with a german town post WW2, St Helens-Stuttgart.