Let's hope they never feel the need to modernize it and engage the people who ruined the imperial war museum in London....
Heh … Partly, this
is the modernization: until 20 years ago or so, off the top of my head, most of the exhibits were displayed outside, and most were wrecks even before having been left outside for 50 years. This is a good example of what it was like ca. the 1980s:
(
source, which has some examples of “then” and “now”.)
Much the same goes for the Panther, the Sherman Crab, the Nebelwerfer and even aircraft like the B-25 Mitchell. Pretty much all the damaged vehicles you can see inside the museum now (
except the Nashorn — there’s a diorama in that video, if you ask me), used to be outside and were put on the museum grounds in the 1940s mostly
because they were wrecked — leftovers from the
battle of Overloon.
In 2006, the museum took over the collection of the former Marshall Museum, which meant expanding it gigantically to the building it’s in now. That collection consisted of vehicles and all kinds of other stuff, from WWII to the 1970s or so, all of which was displayed until most of the modern stuff was removed, apparently not long ago. And then there was the fuss about the museum selling off parts of its collection in order to raise funds, leading to things like
Cookie (see the “source” link above) being sold to Italy where it was put on display as a war memorial to Canadian troops that liberated some town, when it was 1) of a type not used by the Canadians in Italy at all, 2)
was actually used at Overloon, and 3) was in more or less historically correct markings when it was in the museum. Maybe the IWM got things wrong more badly, but the Overloon museum was probably also better ten years ago than it is now