Wednesday June 22nd

A warm sunny day!

In the morning drove to the Netherlands World War II and Resistance Museum south of Arnhem. British Field Marshal Montgomery , after missing an opportunity to trap the bulk of German troops in Normandy , tried to do it in the Netherlands in the fall of 1944. Everything had to work perfectly for it to succeed but that didn't happen. It was a costly failure. (A Bridge Too Far) Not only were thousands of Allied troops cut off from reinforcements & killed, but hundreds of Dutch Resistance fighters mistakenly came out in the open to fight, and were captured and killed themselves. The huge museum, on the site of one of the largest tank battles of the war , has many photographs and memorabilia displayed. The photo below was like an arrow through my heart. The museum also has a huge building with tanks, airplanes and vehicles.

From there we drove to the Hoge Veleuw National Park, which is Netherlands largest National Park. A German industrialist wanted a hunting preserve and his wife wanted a place to house their art collection , so they got both. She started collecting art about 1909 and put together the largest collection of Van Gogh works anywhere except those held by the artist's family. The museum holds not only a van Gogh collection which rivals the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, but also a large collection of other modern art, including Picasso, Mondrian and others. There are also some impressionist paintings there, but that was not her main interest. All together she bought over 10,000 works of art over the course of about 20 years. The land and the art were donated to the Netherlands in the early 1930s. We don't know if the Nazis carried it off during the war, but they kept such good records that a lot of what they stole did get restored to museums and churches after the war. Of things stolen from Jews , not so much was never returned.

We drove to the town of apeldoorn, the site of the largest Royal Palace, which we will visit tomorrow.