But as he carried the box out to the flatbed of his truck and reached for a garbage bin, a breeze lifted one of the covers, and a word in red block letters stopped him: “SECRET.”
A mechanic for his local school district near Waterloo, New York, Hurdle doesn’t encounter government documents with classified markings. Initially, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. But as he read the pages, he started to get an idea.
The 80-year-old, onionskin pages were mostly handwritten, first-person accounts by American prisoners of war, or POWs, describing their experiences in German captivity during World War II. The soldiers recounted being held prisoner in cramped, unsanitary conditions with little food, warmth or medicine. In total, the nearly 300 pages Hurdle discovered included more than 120 soldiers’ experiences, an astonishing record nearly forever lost had he simply thrown the file away.
In July, the National Archives
announced the documents had been safely recovered by its Archival Recovery Program, a detectivelike team of archivists who hunt down federal records that are either lost or stolen. The government has
also recovered Apollo mission records, a presidential pardon signed by Franklin Pierce, an 1812 congressional vote tally sheet and an 1854 letter to then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis from Army 1st Lt. J.E.B. Stuart before the two men joined the Confederacy. All but the World War II records were recovered from auction houses or collectors.
