Anne Frank Almost Made it to the US

Documents released today show that the father of Anne Frank attempted to obtain a United States Visa for himself and his family, after the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has documents that show that Otto Frank asked for help in getting funds from a college friend in order to leave Holland with his family.

Letters and telegrams from 1941 confirm Otto Frank's efforts to save his family by taking them out of the Netherlands and procuring safe passage to the United States. He had asked his friend, Nathan Strauss Junior, for $5,000 in order to escape from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

In one letter, as reported to Reuters, Otto Frank wrote that, "It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance." Nathan Strauss, whose father owned Macy's department store, was the head of the United States Housing Authority at the time of the letter.

Letters also show that the Franks attempted to ask others for help including Otto Frank's brother-in-law in Boston, Julius Hollander. Other papers show that on his part, Strauss made several appeals to government officials on behalf of the Franks, but the timing may have been a factor in the Frank's inability to obtain the proper papers to leave Holland.

American University Professor Richard Breitman told Reuters that if the Franks had acted sooner, "Anne Frank could be a 77-year-old woman living in Boston today." He believes that Otto Frank's efforts came at a time when the Nazis were making it more difficult to leave and the US was making it harder to enter the country.

The Franks did obtain Cuban visas on December 1, 1941, but when the US declared war on Germany ten days later the visas were cancelled. The Franks went into hiding for two years during which time Anne Frank wrote her now famous diary. The Franks were eventually found by the Nazis and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where Anne Frank died. Otto Frank survived the camp and died in 1980.

David Engel, a professor at New York University, says that there is evidence that Frank may have pursued exit visas after a member of the Dutch Nazi Party showed him a letter in which he was being denounced as a Jew in April 1941. Frank first contacted Strauss 12 days later.

A researcher at YIVO found the documents in the archives in 2005, but copyright issues held up the release of the papers until today.