Frank’s family foiled coming to U.S.
Attempts by Anne Frank’s father to escape the Nazis in Europe and travel to the United States were complicated by tight U.S. restrictions on immigration at the time, one of a series of roadblocks that narrowed the Frank family’s options and thrust them into hiding, according to new research.
The research, conducted jointly by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, details the challenges faced by the Frank family and thousands of others looking to escape Europe as Nazi Germany gained strength and antirefugee sentiment swept the United States.
Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was never outright denied an immigration visa, the report concludes, but “bureaucracy, war and time” thwarted his efforts. To obtain a visa, Frank would have had to gather copies of family birth certificates, military records and proof of a paid ticket to America, among other documents, and be interviewed at the consulate.
In one instance, an application that Frank said he submitted in 1938 languished in a U.S. consulate in Rotterdam, Netherlands, amid a swell of similar applications and was lost in a bombing raid in 1940. Frank wrote to a friend that the extensive papers he had gathered as part of a visa application “have been destroyed there.”
In 1941, as Frank was again attempting to navigate the matrix of paperwork and sponsors necessary to immigrate, the U.S. government imposed a stricter review of applications for visas, grew suspicious of possible spies and saboteurs among Jewish refugees, and banned applicants with relatives in German-occupied countries. Frank had sought help from an influential friend, Nathan Straus Jr., who was the head of the U.S. Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and the son of a Macy’s coowner. Despite Straus’ connections, Frank wrote to him that “all their efforts would be useless” given the immigration climate, the report states.
Anne Frank’s diaries describing her time in hiding gave a voice to millions of Nazi victims. She was eventually discovered and she died in a concentration camp in 1945, when she was 15.