For up, i’m from Germany and this is got to be taken in perspective, because everything I critic is still worlds better than any American, British or French history museum: it’s the last week of my exchange year and i thought i gotta visit the Canadian war museum at least once, as I knew that it’s going to be interesting to see what Canada thinks about (and did during) world war 1 and 2, because in Germany we never even mention Canada once. Neither in our museums nor in our history classes (as Canada generally is overshadowed by the US, the USSR and the UK).

I enjoyed the exposition on world war 2 and also the ones on the war of 1812 and the Boer war and so on, but the one on world war one seemed quite nationalistic and patriotic. Coming from Germany of course I have a high expectation for self critical historical examinations, because well… there’s a lot of critical history in Germany, but world war 1 is definitely not solely the Central Power’s fault, even though it was quite harshly represented like that.

Like most historians agree, even though the war was solely blamed on Germany, the UK, France, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Japan and Austria-Hungary contributed quite a lot to the mess that we call world war 1, but this was not well represented and it seemed like the ‘evil’ Germans were just attacking everyone and the ‘selfless’ UK just happens to have time and help all the poor countries that were attacked.

Even though I think the way the war turned out was definitely better than the other options and Germany probably committed more atrocities than the Entente, this was a very one sighted view of history. A minor addition would be maybe to include the Canadian participation during the Dresden fire bombing which can definitely be considered a war crime (It doesn’t even come close to other German atrocities and war crimes during world war 2, but it’s still a war crime) and killed between 35-60k civilians (while some historians suggest numbers up to 600k civilians).

I enjoyed the visit, but the lack of self critic made it seem much more nationalistic than any German history museum that talks about world war one and two that I’ve ever visited. It’s not even close to how bad American museums are, but it could still get some improvement.