The Hoover Institution Archives has acquired the wartime memoirs of Stanislaw Kroczak, an officer with the Twenty-Second Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps. In his memoirs Kroczak recalls his childhood in a village south of the city of Lwow (now Lviv), his fight against invading German and Soviet forces in September 1939, and his subsequent imprisonment and hard labor in the north of Russia. One charming part of the memoir concerns one of the best-known and celebrated animal mascots of the war, Wojtek the bear.

The Hoover Archives has received the papers of Spas Raikin, a Bulgarian-American historian, and émigré anti-communist activist. His papers, contained in ninety-nine binders, document Raikin’s historical research and writing as well as Bulgarian émigré activities in the United States. Binder nr. 71, however, is different from the others. It documents an episode in Raikin’s life that has a place in world history: his meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald in the port at Hoboken, New Jersey on June 13, 1962, when Oswald was returning from the Soviet Union.

Adolf Kurtz, a Protestant pastor, following Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, resisted the government’s efforts to control religious life in Germany. In that his wife was born a Jew, he organized a relief agency to help Christians of Jewish heritage. After the war, in 1948, Pastor Kurtz was invited by the British military authorities in Berlin to come to England to visit German prisoner-of-war camps. A year ago, Hoover Archives acquired a collection of letters, certificates, church registers, and photographs, mostly associated with Pastor Kurtz’s later life in Oxford. The newly acquired increment consists of many original personal documents, mostly from the pastor’s earlier years in Berlin.

The Hoover Institution Library and Archives have recently acquired more than two hundred pieces of historical materials relating to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a sociopolitical movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976. Set into motion by Mao Zedong, then chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, its goal was to enforce socialism by removing capitalist, traditional, and cultural elements from Chinese society and to impose Maoist orthodoxy within the party. This increment, which augments an earlier collection of Hoover’s Chinese Communist Party records contains nearly two hundred issues of the Red Guard “little newspapers” between 1967 and 1971 and other communist pamphlets, internal party documents, booklets, serial issues, and published speeches of communist leaders during this period.