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Against the background of the great European war of the early twentieth century, Herbert Hoover’s idea of a scholarly institution collecting documentation on war, revolution, and peace was conceived and developed. Greatly expanded during the decades that followed, European materials now constitute the largest and most comprehensive part of Hoover’s international holdings.
Katharina Friedla is a research fellow and the Taube Family Curator for European Collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University. She has studied History, East European and Jewish Studies at the Free University in Berlin, the Hebrew Unive...
This collection contains digitized copies of thousands of pages of Estonian KGB files relating to secret police and intelligence activities, dissident and anti-Soviet activities, and repatriation and nationalism issues in Estonia.
The recently acquired Javier Benedet collection contains significant materials relating to the Spanish Civil War and to fundraising efforts in Northern California on behalf of the Republican side in that conflict. The Benedet papers also provide documentation on the plight of Republican refugees in the aftermath of the Civil War and on the political life of the Spanish anti-fascist diaspora in France, Mexico, and other countries. In terms of volume, the Benedet papers now constitute the second largest collection (after the Burnett Bolloten papers) in the archives pertaining to the Spanish Civil War.
The Hoover Archives has received a collection of documents, postcards and letters connected with the work of the American Relief Administration. Herbert Hoover organized and directed the ARA, providing assistance to millions of displaced and hungry victims of World War I. The collection, consisting mostly of stamped postal requests and acknowledgements from individuals and private organizations assisting in the American aid effort, covers the entire period of the ARA’s operation in Central and Eastern Europe, from its early 1919 start in Austria, Hungary and Poland, until the summer of 1923, the end of the American mission in Moscow.
The papers of Polish journalist, writer, politician, and Silesian activist Edmund Osmanczyk (1913–1989) have been added to the Hoover Institution Archives. Osmanczyk’s life was rather atypical for his generation of Polish intellectuals; unlike most others, who were either killed or had to leave the country, he survived the war and forty-five years of communism, and died in free Poland.
For a country located on the strategic frontier of Europe and Asia, with a proud history going back to the fourth century AD, Hoover Archives' holdings on Georgia are modest compared to some of our other international collections, such as those on Russia, Germany, or Poland. Our Georgian collection is expanding, however, thanks to recent initiatives. One such effort involves digitizing the records of the security police and those of the Ministry of the Interior of Soviet Georgia; the other concerns the Dmitri Shalikashvili papers, our most comprehensive and best-known source on Georgian history.
Stanford historian Amir Weiner recently examined the newly accessible KGB files housed in the Hoover Institution Archives. Weiner found that “a system of checks and balances in today's Western-style democracies prevents agencies like the FBI from engaging in domestic surveillance at the same invasive scale as the KGB” (Stanford Report). The collection is composed of tens of thousands of documents, including informants' reports, interrogation minutes, and official internal correspondence. Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB archives are the largest accessible holdings (Russian and Ukrainian holdings are, for all practical purposes, closed) of the Soviet political police, which were left almost intact in Vilnius, Lithuania, after the Soviet Union disintegrated.
George S. Scherbatoff (1897-1976), a US Navy commander during and after the Second World War, also served as a member of numerous naval and diplomatic missions, including the US delegation to the conference at Yalta in 1945. The donated album, which is entitled “Trip to Greece with the UN Balkan Commission, November 1947-May 1948,” contains many photographs of the commission’s activities that are described by accompanying notes.
The Hoover Archives has added a collection that documents the career of Wladyslaw Gomulka, a Polish communist leader and first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party from October 1956 to December 1970. The collection consists of Gomulka’s early memoirs, the interrogation file compiled during his imprisonment in 1951–54, transcripts of oral history interviews with his two secretaries, and other documents and photographs.
Two significant émigré collections have been added to Hoover’s already extensive Hungarian library and archival holdings: those of Hugo Sonyi and Bela Csejtey. The two have very different biographies: the first was a top Hungarian general, the other, an American-educated scientist. Their collections however are similar in focus: Hungary’s military efforts in the two world wars, which, despite the valiant sacrifice of many thousands of soldiers, ended in defeat.
