Exhibiting war to understand peace – how do military museums adjust to the need to foster international understanding and peaceful conflict resolution?

War museums today face a number of challenges which contest their traditional approach: Peace keeping has become a prime task of international politics and organizations; aggressive wars are ruled out by international law signed by a vast majority of states. Usually, military museums in the former socialist countries were either closed by the Soviet Union after the Second World War or had to agree to praise the Red Army. This chapter identifies strategies of how museum experts cope with the aforementioned challenges taking into consideration continuity and change in architecture, exhibition design, pedagogical as well political messages of war museums. To make the curators' intentions more obvious and to make people believe in peace instead of war, a second building was opened in the year 2002 which deals with the post-Second World War history up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.