One artifact of a bygone era stands out from the rest at the Canadian War Museum.
It’s an ink-black “Grosser” Mercedes 770 W150 limousine built in the 1930s, with a convertible top, broad fenders and large tires. The passenger-side glass of the armoured parade car is spiderwebbed with cracks.
Grant Vogl, the museum’s arms and technology collections specialist, said visitors find the exhibit “imposing.”
“[It’s] something that really affects visitors when they come in and they realize that this is not just any car,” he said. “It’s the car that was used by Adolf Hitler.”
Jeff Noakes, the museum’s Second World War historian, said the limousine is an important piece of the Canadian War Museum’s collection that helps provide a “much larger context” of the Second World War.
But other experts have argued having it on display “glamorizes Nazism.”
The long road from Laufen
Vogl and Noakes explained how the limousine eventually found its way from Germany across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada, a story that starts just before the end of the Second World War.
In May 1945, an American unit was pursuing retreating Germans near Laufen, a town on the border between Germany and Austria.
Amid the gunfire, Sgt. Joe Azara discovered the limousine sitting atop a railway flatcar and decided to take it.
“Joe and his friends literally drive it off the flatcar,” Noakes said. The limousine had been damaged by “small arms fire, so by a rifle or submachine gunner or something like that.”
The limousine was eventually converted into a staff vehicle for the U.S. Army. In August 1945, the same month that Japan announced its surrender and the war ended, the car was shipped to the United States.
It sat in a storage facility at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland until 1956 when it was auctioned off to a Montreal automobile collector named Herbert O’Connell, who had the limousine restored by an expert in Toronto.
“They decide, interestingly enough, not to repair the damage, especially to the window, because it’s seen as a piece of the vehicle’s history,” Vogl said.
The limousine was sold once more, to a Quebec attorney named Claude Pratt, who offered it to the museum. It arrived by May 1970, when a librarian named Ludwig Koshche was able to prove the car had indeed been used by the German dictator.
A controversial exhibit
The limousine was more than just “a way to get from A to B” for Hitler, Noakes and Vogl explained: It was a propaganda tool, too.
The vehicle used cutting-edge technology for the time, and boasted unique features such as a seat that flips into a riser to stand on for speeches and other public appearances.
It’s an artifact where obviously you’re going to have concerns about how people react to it.– Jeff Noakes, WWII historian, Canadian War Museum
But in 2000, a former director of the museum, Jack Granatstein, proposed selling it. He told CBC at the time he worried that displaying the car “glamorizes Nazism.”
Vogl said the public pushback was immense.
“The museum was fielding as many as a call, one call or e-mail every two minutes for a week straight,” he recalled. “What I remember reading is a lot of people simply saying, ‘It’s a piece of history, it’s something that should be kept. Why would you want to get rid of it?'”
“It’s an artifact where obviously you’re going to have concerns about how people react to it,” Noakes said. “And in a large part, that can be a product of how it’s presented.”
At the museum’s previous, smaller home at 330 Sussex Dr., Noakes said it was harder to provide “educational opportunities” due to the limited space. At 1 Vimy Place, he argues visitors see the car in a more appropriate context.
“As you go through the gallery, you find out more about exactly what happens as a result of the events that are basically unleashed on the world in large part through the actions of Adolf Hitler,” Noakes said.
“That helps contextualize the artifact and make it clear that this isn’t an object where people can say, ‘Oh wow, cool.’ Because if you present it in the wrong context, it’s a propaganda instrument.”