Anne Frank’s family tried to flee from Nazis to America

RESEARCH suggests the family of Anne Frank attempted to emigrate to the United States and later also to Cuba, but their efforts were thwarted by America’s restrictive immigration policy and the outbreak of the Second World War.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum said yesterday that documents indicate that Anne’s father, Otto Frank, tried twice to collect the papers needed to obtain visas for the United States. He later also appears to have applied for a visa to Cuba.

“I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see USA is the only country we could go to,” Otto Frank wrote in English to a friend in the United States in 1941.

His efforts to get the family out of the Netherlands to the US probably started as early as 1938 – a turbulent year in which Nazi Germany annexed Austria and part of Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich. On Nov 9 that year, Nazis terrorised Jews throughout the country in the violent Kristallnacht pogroms, also known as the Night of Broken Glass.

Otto wrote in a 1941 letter to his friend Nathan Straus that he had filed an application at the American consulate in Rotterdam in 1938. However, he also mentioned that “all the papers have been destroyed there”, because on May 14 1940, while the Frank family was still on a waiting list for visas, the consulate was devastated by German bombardment.

Even without the loss of their application, they were among hundreds of thousands of people seeking refuge in the US each year by the time war broke out in 1939, with Washington issuing fewer than 30,000 visas annually.

The Frank family went into hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam on July 6 1942. On Aug 4, 1944 they were discovered and deported to Auschwitz.

Anne’s father Otto survived the war. Anne and her sister died in Bergenbelsen death camp. Anne was 15.