“Sometimes the personal stories are more interesting than a piece of steel.”īesides the displays, each spring the museum sponsors a special event.
“It was just a piece of steel, but I’m very proud of this,” he said. He knows the only survivor, who still lives in Schweinfurt. Weissenseel said his favorite piece in the museum is the commander’s hatch of a WWII German tank in which three men died during a Soviet attack. M4 Sherman tanks, two mainstays of the Allied war effort in World War II. Nearby sit, side-by-side, Soviet T-34 and U.S.
Just inside the entry gate is a village forge from the nearby village of Gerolzhofen, built in 1829 and used by a family of blacksmiths for 149 years. In front of the museum stand a 1936 Gmeinder railroad locomotive and a 1950s-vintage F-84 Thunderstreak fighter from the West German air force, mounted on a pole in a takeoff pose. Since then it has grown more than tenfold, to some 54,000 square feet in two adjacent buildings, with more tanks and artillery stored outside. The homespun Museum Militär-und Zeitgeschichte (Museum of Military and Contemporary History) opened three years later on a farm on the edge of Stammheim, a village along the Main River about 15 miles north of Kitzingen. In 1994, he and some friends created the Military History Club Franconia with the hopes of displaying some of the pieces he had gathered. He gathered German, American and, later, Soviet relics wherever he could find them. He collected documents, uniforms, weapons, trucks, tanks, even field kitchens. His youthful friendship with soldiers grew into an avid interest in all things military.
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