"Hitler’s Car and the State of Canadian History": Jack Granatstein, the Canadian War Musuem, and our history

This recent post gives background on the vehicle. Mr Granatstein has sent me a 2001 paper of his, parts of which are excerpted below. Among many other books Mr Granastein is the authour of Who Killed the Canadian Military

(1998, briefly, all of us):

On July l, 1998, I became the Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa for a two-year term. This was the best job I have ever had in my life and if only the Museum had been in Toronto where my family was, I would have stayed forever...

One milestone on this route to a government decision to support a new military history museum was the extraordinary case of Hitler’s car, an artifact that caused a loud public clamour in February 2000, just before the decision on funding. Let me explain.

In 1970, the War Museum was given a Grosser Mercedes touring car...

Subsequent research in the CWM determined beyond doubt that the car was one of six or seven in Adolf Hitler’s personal fleet. And the presentation in the War Museum on Sussex Drive now shows it as Hitler’s car.

That presentation is dreadful. The car sits on the third floor oozing evil--but it was originally and still is presented in a mock Bavarian village setting with fretwork hearts cut into the shutters. Dear, dear Adolf who loved dogs and children. Later additions to the display show a mannequin in SS uniform, a large Nazi flag, and small display on concentration camps. With the exception of the SS uniform, these are all but invisible because of the layout.

From the day I arrived, this Hitler shrine offended me...

I had been told that the car might be worth as much as $20 million at auction, a real attraction to someone needing to fundraise $15 million and generally strapped for funding. So one day, showing an Ottawa Citizen reporter through the War Museum, I mused that I would like to sell the wretched car.

I soon learned, if I had not known before, of the power of the press. An Ottawa Citizen story became a Southam News story, a Canadian Press story, a Reuters story, an Agence France Presse story, and a television item here and abroad. In the space of two days of news, the coverage of Hitler’s car resulted in the Museum being flooded by hundreds and hundreds of letters...

At least 99 percent of the public response was hostile. There were half a dozen or so writers who parsed my surname, decided I was Jewish, and declared me a racist who wanted to punish Germans. I was also a tool of the Canadian Jewish Congress. ‘You are Jewish, aren’t you?,’ one writer said. ‘You are obviously letting your personal feelings dictate what the Canadian public is allowed to see and not see.’ There were some who argued on museological grounds with arcane arguments about the principles of deaccessioning artifacts. But the great majority argued along these lines:

1. Canadians had fought and died to capture this limousine and now the War Museum was getting rid of it, probably to the Americans, to neo-Nazis, or to some Saudi prince.

2. The War Museum and me personally were in the grip of ‘the Politically Correct school of museum management’, trying to argue that World War II, as another writer claimed, ‘never happened.’ I was, another said, practicing ‘historical revisionism’. ‘We should not sanitize everything to McDonald’s-like blandness’. I was ‘rewriting history’, yet another claimed, trying to airbrush everything offensive out of the past. There were hundreds of letters along those lines.

As the author of Who Killed Canadian History?, a little book published in 1998 that argued against political correctness, the sanitizing of Canadian history, the pulling of socially useful tidbits out of the past and their use as object lessons by provincial Ministries of Education for social engineering, I am aware that there was a certain irony in my being denounced for all the things I had railed against...

On reflection, the anti-Semitic ravers and the outright crazies aside, I have come to see that the firestorm of response was heartening. Canadians genuinely seemed to believe that their history belonged to them, and they did not want museums, bureaucrats, historians or anyone else trying to take it away from them. Yes, they had the facts of the Hitler car wrong for the most part. The car had not been captured by Canadian soldiers, the War Museum was not airbrushing the war out of its exhibits, far from it. But the writers and callers, by now used to seeing their past blowdried and made inoffensive to anyone, leapt to judgment...

...This is a country that has fought and bled—and still fights and bleeds—to make this a better world, and to portray Canadian nationalism (and Canadian national historians) as riding with Adolf Hitler in his Grosser Mercedes is insultingly stupid.

The interesting point to me is that the carping notwithstanding, we have, I believe, made some progress in getting history front and centre in the last few years...

...I believe all of us want more history to be read and watched and taught, more for Canadians to know and more for them to understand better than they have done. We all should believe that Canada is a special place and that native-born Canadians and those who come here as immigrants should know how this happened. No past, no future, in other words, and that past and future is local, regional, AND national. We have many limited identities, but we are all and always Canadians too.

The Hitler’s car story suggests to me very strongly that the Canadian people want to know their history. And I think it’s important that we be leading this parade, not dragged behind. The parade has reached the first street corner and the band is striking up, and I hope you will take your place in the front rank.
Hitler’s car is featured in the new Canadian War Museum, but the presentation of the exhibit is executed with much more attention to historical truth. No one who sees it will be able to conclude that the Fuhrer loved dogs and children.

Hitler’s car is featured in the new Canadian War Museum, but the presentation of the exhibit is executed with much more attention to historical truth. No one who sees it will be able to conclude that the Fuhrer loved dogs and children.