During our visit to Weil Am Rhein and an excursion to Weil Am Rhein some of our members visited the Schlumph Collection; The National Motor Museum of France whilst others visited a Railway Museum.  The Motor Museum is built around the Schlumpf Collection of classic automobiles. It has the largest displayed collection of automobiles and contains the largest and most comprehensive collection of Bugatti motor vehicles in the world.

Brothers Brothers Hand & Fritz Schlumph were Swiss citizens born in Italy, but after their mother Jeanne was widowed, she moved the family to her home town of Mulhouse.

In 1935 the Schlumpf brothers founded a company which focused on producing spun woollen products. By 1940, at the time of the German invasion of France, 34-year-old Fritz was the chairman of a spinning mill.  After World War II, the two brothers devoted their time to obsessively growing their business, and became Billionaires.

Over the years nearly 400 items (vehicles, chassis and engines) were acquired, and from 1964 as the woollen industry started to downturn, a wing of the former 200,000 sq ft (19,000 m²) Mulhouse spinning mill was chosen to quietly restore and house the collection.

A team of up to 40 carpenters, saddlers, and master mechanics was assembled to carry out the restoration work, who under a confidentiality agreement kept their work and the scale of the collection a secret - a singlemindedness often referred to as "The Schlumpf Obsession." Many, including members of Bugatti clubs around the world, knew of the collection. The scale of the enterprise surprised almost everybody.

Fritz visited Mulhouse daily, choosing the colours and type of restoration each car would receive. The workers removed the mill's interior walls and laid a red tile walkway with gravel floors for the cars to rest upon. The brothers Schlumpf remained very secretive about their car collection, only rarely showing it to a favoured few.

In light of the unrelenting global shift of textile manufacturing to Asia, by 1976 the Schlumpf brothers began selling their factories. In October they laid off employees, and a strike broke out, with 400 police holding back the workers from ransacking the Mulhouse plant. After a stand-off, on March 7, 1977, textile-union activists staged a sit-in strike at Schlumpf offices, and broke into the Mulhouse "factory" to find the astounding collection of cars.  An unrestored Austin 7 was burned and the workers' union representative remarked "There are 600 more where this one came from."

The Schlumpfs fled to their native Switzerland and spent the rest of their days as permanent residents of the Drei Koenige Hotel in Basel. But with wages and tax evasion accusations outstanding, the factory was occupied the next two years by the textile-union and renamed "Workers’ Factory." To recoup some lost wages, the union opened the museum to the public, with some 800,000 people viewing the collection in two years.

As the scale of the brothers Schlumpf debt rose, various creditors, including the French government and unions, eyed the car collection toward recovering their losses. To save the collection from destruction, break-up or export the contents were classified in 1978 as a French Historic Monument by Council of State. In 1979,liquidator ordered the building closed.

In 1981 the collection, buildings and residual land were sold to the National Automobile Museum Association a state sanctioned public/private conglomerate and placed daily management of the museum in the hands of an operating company, the National Automobile Museum of Mulhouse Management Association, which opened the museum to the public in 1982.

However, lacking the enthusiasm of the Schlumpfs or the financial drive of the union, the collection gradually fell into decline.

In 1999 they contracted Culturespaces to take over and modernise the museum and its operations. Culturespaces renovated the museum, including creating large scale public spaces for other cultural events, while conserving the well-known main hall with its Pont Alexandra 111 Lampposts widening the relevance of the museum to a younger audience by being given control of the French national automobile collection, the museum reopened in March 2000 as the largest automobile museum in the world.

Source Wikipedia