The record
A slab of the inner wall bought because four other presidential libraries had one — for the president whose food programmes fed German children twice.
Herbert Hoover's connection to Germany is the reason this record exists. He organised food supplies for the Allied front when the United States entered the First World War, and afterwards ran the American Food Administration, which into the early 1920s also fed a starving German population. Elected president at the height of the Depression in 1929 and out of office in 1933, he returned to Germany in 1946 at the government's request to report on conditions, and what he found led to the Hoover school meals introduced across the western occupation zones in April 1947, which saved hundreds of thousands of children from malnutrition. He went back for the last time in December 1954 and was received warmly; in a speech in Bonn, in the library's own translation, he prayed that Germany might be given back the unity and complete freedom it needed. He died in 1964 and is buried at West Branch in Iowa, where his presidential library stands.
The library was thoroughly renovated after 1989. Four other presidential libraries — Kennedy's, Ford's, Reagan's and Nixon's — had by then secured a piece of the Wall as what the Foundation calls a victory trophy of the Cold War, and the director, Richard Norton Smith, went after one as well, on the strength of Hoover's services to Germany. There was no room for a complete segment, so a small slab of the Hinterlandmauer was bought from the Berlin Wall Commemorative Group. It carries a landscape in green and red under white clouds, by an unknown hand, and was delivered on 2 April 1992.
It now stands in a metal frame at the end of the exhibition on Hoover's life, with a line beside it: Herbert Hoover did not live to see the Berlin Wall crumble but he never doubted the ultimate triumph of freedom.
How did it get here?
A slab of the Hinterlandmauer bought from the Berlin Wall Commemorative Group by the library's director Richard Norton Smith and delivered on 2 April 1992.
Sources
Listed by the Federal Foundation as #181.
Federal Foundation — Berlin Wall worldwide, site entry ↗
Hoover's food relief work in Germany after both world wars and the Hoover school meals of April 1947, his 1954 visit and the quoted Bonn speech supplied by the library, his burial at West Branch, the renovation of the library after 1989, the wall pieces already held by the Kennedy, Ford, Reagan and Nixon libraries, Richard Norton Smith's purchase of a Hinterlandmauer slab from the Berlin Wall Commemorative Group, its delivery on 2 April 1992, its painting, and the text displayed beside it.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17
Words and a Wall: Remembering the fall of the Berlin Wall ↗
A National Archives blog says pieces of the Wall were offered to the presidential libraries it runs, and that the Hoover Library displays its piece in the gallery on Hoover's post-war humanitarian work.
Institutional sourceSource accessed 2026-09-17
Federal Foundation — Berlin Wall worldwide ↗
The source lists this place as a Berlin Wall location. Coordinates, where supplied, are source-reported and may represent a general area. This is not independent verification of authenticity, current presence, or public access.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17 · Source record 181
No photograph of this one has been published. If you have taken one, or know when it arrived or who gave it, we would like to hear. Contribute to this record