One last post about the different kinds of archives you might need to consult during a WWII research project. We’ve discussed governmental archives and the archives of institutes and museums dedicated to studying the war. There are other types of archives that may or may not have what you’re looking for.

Being bureaucracies, universities have their own archives which often have “special collections.” These concern alumni or professors rather than the school itself. They get there because someone was left with a whole bunch of papers that seemed important but they didn’t really know what to do with them. I found a cassette tape of an interview of the leader of Dutch-Paris in the special collections of the University of Michigan because a former professor interviewed him for a book she wrote in the early 1980s. Similarly, a university in Brussels has the papers of a leader of Dutch-Paris in the city that had been given to a professor by the man’s widow. The archivist told me they had been lost, which I consider to be open to interpretation. If a person in whom you’re interested had a connection to a university or was studied by a professor at a university, it’s worth checking the catalog there.

This brings us to an unusual archive with a surprising collection about the war and resistance: the archive of the Hoover Institution located on the campus of Stanford University in California. Hoover is Herbert Hoover, who may not be warmly remembered as president of the US but who did phenomenal work providing humanitarian aid during the First World War and the Russian civil war. Hoover and his archivists were interested in the upheaval and suffering caused by war. They had enough money to send teams into Europe behind the American Army in 1944-1945 to gather and/or copy documents from across the continent. During the decades when archives about the war were closed in Europe, scholars used documents at the Hoover to write definitive histories of the war there. This reputation and their own efforts to acquire more documents have only increased the Hoover’s holdings, making it a premier archive about the war and resistance.

If the person in whom you’re interested belonged to a religious order, it’s worth finding the order’s archive and inquiring. If they don’t have any papers, their newsletter might have published an interview with the person. Similarly, individual churches have archives.

Private associations such as clubs or veterans’ groups might also have archives. Will there be anything relevant in such a collection? You won’t know if you don’t ask and possibly take a series of trains and buses to go look in the cupboard for yourself.

So think broadly about where the information you’re looking for may have settled. Make sure to befriend the archivists. And make sure to contact an archive before you travel to it. They tend to have odd hours and bizarre holidays. An archive might also require special permission that can take months to apply for and receive. These days they might even have put what you’re looking for online and may prefer that you look at the digital copy. Good luck!