Research suggests that the family of Anne Frank, the Jewish diarist who died in the Holocaust, attempted to immigrate to the United States and later to Cuba, but their efforts were tragically thwarted by America’s immigration policy, cumbersome bureaucracy and the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum said on Friday that documents indicate Anne’s father Otto tried twice to collect the papers needed to obtain visas for the U.S.
While the Franks were not explicitly denied visas by the American consulate, “their efforts were thwarted by American bureaucracy, war and time,” the historians wrote.
“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 Nathan Straus, a friend in the U.S., in 1941. Otto Frank wrote that he had filed an application at the American consulate in the Dutch port city of 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 possible visas, the American consulate was devastated during German bombardment and all papers were lost.
Even without the loss of their visa application, it would have been difficult for the Franks to immigrate to the U.S. With hundreds of thousands of people seeking refuge in the U.S. each year by the time war broke out in 1939, Washington was issuing fewer than 30,000 annual visas.
A renewed attempt in 1941 to get the family to the U.S. failed because all American consulates in Germany-occupied Europe, including the Netherlands, were closed by the Nazis. A visa application to Cuba that same year also never came through.