Wahn Airport, near Bohn, Germany, Nov. 22, 1954: Former President Herbert Hoover addresses gathered reporters at Wahn Airport, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer standing behind him on the right. Hoover was personally invited to Germany by Adenauer, who remarked that the former president had always been motivated by humanitarian aims.

Although best known in the United States — justly or unjustly — as the president who failed to adequately respond to the country’s 1929 stock market crash and subsequent depression, the Germans know him better for his post-war humanitarian efforts.

In 1946 Hoover travelled to Germany as President Truman’s special investigator for Continental relief needs. As Honorary Chairman of the Famine Emergency Committee (FEC), Hoover and his team travelled 50,000 miles to thirty-eight different nations from March and into June 1946 to witness and evaluate famine needs in the afflicted nations and arrange food supplies. His 1947 trip to Germany and Austria was his second trip as the two countries were still struggling.

The original negative that this image was captured on suffers from a preservation issue called “silvering,” where the silver particles rise to the top of the gelatin layer of the film. During a preservation survey of Stripes’ photo collection in 2018, archives staff found that especially the 4x5 negatives from the late 1940s and early 1950s were suffering the most from this preservation issue. As the “silvering” will eventually cause the image captured on the negative to fade, the affected negatives were pulled and prioritized for scanning.

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