Some of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, now run as museums, could soon demand an entrance fee from visitors to help to finance educational facilities.

The prospect of paying to enter Dachau, where SS guards used to issue threats to inmates that they would leave only through the chimneys of the crematorium, has created controversy in Germany as the country considers how best to acknowledge its past.

Pieter Dietz de Loos, president of the International Dachau Committee, believes that there is no choice but to charge visitors. He says that the museum cannot meet its obligation to educate the young about the horrors of the Holocaust. Dachau, in a northern suburb of Munich, is visited by 800,000 people each year but the camp museum can only afford to pay one full-time educational assistant. Money is also running out to support Dachau survivors. “In five years we will be completely broke,” Mr Dietz de Loos said.

The idea of an entry ticket to the camps – museum officials at Buchenwald and Ravens-brück have also given warning of cash shortages – has outraged the Central Board of Jews in Germany. “These are graveyards,” a spokesman said. “You do not pay to mourn the dead.”

What appears to be the violation of a taboo is actually an argument about historical memory. There is no point, many camp museum directors argue, in preserving the sites of the Holocaust if staff are not present to explain how and why people were killed there.

“Between a third and a half of all requests for guided tours and educational support are having to be turned down,” said Günter Morsch, who supervises the memorial sites in Sach-senhausen, Ravensbrück and Brandenburg.

Former concentration camps in Germany are funded by both the federal and regional governments but the money, directors insisted, just about covered operating costs. Mr Morsch said that there was no extra funding for special exhibitions or seminars; the publication budget stretched to only two catalogues a year. The budget for Buchenwald camp has been capped since 1998.

Auschwitz, the biggest Nazi concentration camp, in southern Poland, receives more generous subsidies and has gained the support of Ron Lauder, the American philanthropost, to help to restore the splintering wooden barrack rooms of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The camps in Germany, in contrast, have attracted little private sponsorship: companies do not want their brand associated with the Holocaust. Indeed, it took many decades to persuade the Bavarian government to make big investments in the upkeep of Dachau – only in the late 1990s did the region pay for the construction of a hostel for visitors.

Even now the local council prefers to market itself as a pretty former artists’ colony rather than the place where more than 30,000 inmates died. Locals objected for years to the placing of signs directing visitors to the camp.

Of all the camps in Germany, Dachau usually stirs the deepest emotions among visitors. It was the first to be opened by the Nazis, in 1933, and was one of the last to be liberated. Most of the living quarters have been razed but one barrack room has row upon row of tiny beds.

The crematorium building, with stone ovens, stands outside the main museum building. Dachau was the scene of grisly medical experiments – inmates were forced to drink gallons of saltwater infected with malaria, or were dipped into frozen water tanks.

The issue is complicated by the competition among the former Nazi camps for funding against east German sites that commemorate the victims of Stalinism. Christian Democrats, including Bernd Neu-mann, who is in charge of cultural affairs in Angela Merkel’s Chancellery, are arguing that Nazi and Communist sites should be managed along the same principles because all involved were “victims of political dictatorship”.

The Central Board of Jews said that this terminology was blurring the historical record, equating Stalinist crimes with those of the Nazis and diminishing the Holocaust. Only free access to the old Nazi camps could keep the German memory straight, they argued, and money for teaching would have to be found elsewhere, not by the sale of tickets.

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