During the 1991 aggression on Croatia, Vukovar was hit the most.
The systematic destruction on Vukovar lasted for three full months. Hundreds of thousands of missiles were dropped on the town, relentlessly destroying apartment buildings, houses, kindergartens and schools, factories, cultural monuments and the hospital. Following the unequal fight, Vukovar was occupied on November 18, 1991. The occupation of the town was followed by mass executions of captured Croatian soldiers and civilians, as well as looting and prosecution of civilians, which included a great amount of elderly, sick, or wounded individuals, women and children. The dark statistics mark 2717 people who were killed - Croatian soldiers and civilians, including 200 wounded, civilians and medical personnel who were found at the Ovčara scaffold. The youngest person was 16 years old, and the oldest was 77 years old. The identified victims included Stjepan Petrović, head of the Bauer Collection at the Vukovar Municipal Museum. Following the occupation of Vukovar, almost 3000 civilians were taken and abused in Serbian concentration camps. Nearly 150 people are still considered missing. After the occupation of Vukovar, non-Serbian residents were displaced from their homes. They spent a minimum of seven years in exile in over 560 places all over Croatia. Their return occurred on January 15, 1998, following the process of peaceful reintegration of the Croatian Danube region in the constitutional legal order of the Republic of Croatia.
Among the badly destroyed cultural monuments was the Eltz Manor and the Vukovar Municipal Museum. The Museum collections were as well stolen and taken to Novi Sad and Beograd, Republic of Serbia. Stolen collections were estranged up untill 2001, when were returned in Vukovar by interccesion of the Croatian Ministry of Culture. The Museum continued to be active first in the Museum Documentation Centre, then in the Mimara Museum in Zagreb. The return to its domicile address was on May 27, 1998. The museum, in the destroyed building of the Eltz Manor, continued with a series of activities concerning the cultural restoration of the city of Vukovar, which started already in 1992 with the formation of the Collection of Donations of the Vukovar Museum in Exile. It was a gathering of good-willed people who came together around the idea of peace and togetherness, and the victory of good over evil.
Ružica Marić, Director of the Vukovar Municipal Museum