Today, Hartenstein Oosterbeek is 155 years old, but no reason to celebrate

Today, April 25th, Hartenstein, Oosterbeek in The Netherlands is 155 years old but there is no reason for a celebration. The Airborne Museum which houses inside the Hartenstein is in trouble.

The last couple of years the museum has been working at their masterplan to renovate and refurbish the entire museum. For the finish the museum closed up at October last year. This masterplan succeeded completely but at the day of the grand reopening, March 13, the corona measurements kicked-in and there was no reopening and the museum has been closed ever since.

The next day after the announcement of the annulation of the opening , the museum received about 20.000 annulations from the complete foreign touroperater market. These visitors won't be coming to The Netherlands again this year.

A new policy since 2016 is to create profit and the museum saw its income increase by 13% since 2015. The visitors record

has been broken every year since. 95% of the exploitation of the museum is earned by the museum itself, the other 5% comes from the commune of Renkum for like the free entrances for our schoolchildren.

The museum has a lot of costs too. They have a precious collection that needs to be protected and although the small (paid) workforce of 6 people and the help of 120 volunteers, if they can't make any money because the museum has to stay closed, they are heading in the direction of a complete disaster due to the coronacrisis.

Of course they have taken al the steps they can take to lower the costs and asked for help to the Dutch Government, the Airborne Region and the Provence. But of course, they need to help so many others too.

So the museum asks your help and they have come up with different ways to do so.