Case study
Victory Museum, Grootegast
A permanent gallery-screen exhibit showing the liberation of the northern Netherlands day by day, down to the unit that came through your own street.
Liberated in an afternoon
The northern Netherlands was liberated in about a week. Canadian troops reached Groningen on 13 April 1945 and fought through the city until 16 April. The Westerkwartier villages west of it changed hands over the same few days, several of them in a single afternoon.
That speed is the difficulty for a village museum. The liberation of the north is documented thoroughly at the national level — the divisions, the dates, the battle for the city. At the level of one village on one afternoon, it is almost invisible.
The question every local visitor asks
Victory Museum wanted more visitors, and younger ones. What it needed first was an answer to the question that comes up in the gallery every week: who liberated us?
Not the liberation of the Netherlands in the abstract. The formation that came through Grootegast, and the day it did. A regional summary cannot answer that. A map with unit-level positions and dates can.
What we built
A gallery-screen kiosk runs Liberation of the Netherlands — Day by Day, a guided map-story built on Frame 44 Atlas and focused on the liberation of Friesland and Groningen in April and May 1945.
The visitor moves the map forward through the spring. Front lines shift, formations advance, villages change hands, and every step is anchored to a date and a source — 18,000 mapped positions standing on roughly 2,000 pages of the units' own war diaries. Two minutes at the screen gives a visitor the whole liberation of their province. Twenty gives them the entries behind it.
Victory Museum is a small museum in a small town. It did not need to build a research department, and it did not need to wait for one. The record was already mapped.
Two minutes at the screen
Someone from Grootegast walks up, finds their own village, and moves the timeline until the units reach it. There it is: the Royal Canadian Dragoons, 16 April 1945, on their road.
Then they do the thing every museum wants a visitor to do. They keep going — following the Dragoons back to see where they had come from, and forward to see where they went next.
The specifications
| Installation | Permanent gallery-screen kiosk |
|---|---|
| Screen | One 42-inch 4K touchscreen, mini PC |
| Exhibit type | Guided map-story on Frame 44 Atlas |
| Period covered | April 1945 – May 1945 |
| Focus | Liberation of Friesland and Groningen |
| Mapped positions | 18,000 |
| War diary pages | ~2,000 |
| Languages | Dutch and English |
| Sources | Library and Archives Canada; Canadian Research and Mapping Association |
| Running since | April 2026 |
| Museum website | Victory Museum, Grootegast |
If your visitors ask the same question
Every town in the liberated Netherlands has a version of "who liberated us," and for almost all of them the answer is in the war diaries. Tell us which town, and we will tell you what we hold.