The family of the diarist Anne Frank twice tried to obtain US immigration visas but were thwarted by red tape, according to a new report published 76 years after they were forced into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

The report, issued by the Anne Frank House and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, details the challenges faced by Jewish families looking to escape the Nazis’ antisemitic grip on Europe and negotiate anti-refugee sentiment then building in the United States.

Gertjan Broek, a researcher at the Anne Frank House, and Rebecca Erbelding from the USHMM wrote in their report that Otto Frank, Anne’s father, began seeking ways to escape to the US as early as 1938. At the time, the US had no specific refugee policy, but enforced quotas based on national origin.

The Franks were never officially denied visas, the report concludes, but their applications were rendered useless by “bureaucracy, war and time”. One application was lost in a German bombardment of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1940.

The family then faced difficulty obtaining new sets of papers and certificates under a regime that was systematically rendering Jews effectively stateless.

At the same time, the US public recorded increasingly negative attitudes toward refugees. A May 1938 public opinion poll found that 67% of Americans surveyed said they wanted to keep German, Austrian and “other political refugees” out of the United States. By 1941, 71% of those polled said they believed the Nazis had established a US network of spies and saboteurs.

Franklin Roosevelt warned of “spying under compulsion”, and the government acted accordingly, banning applicants with relatives in German-occupied countries. As the report states, “national security took precedence over humanitarian concerns”.

As their prospects worsened, Otto Frank turned to Nathan Straus, an American businessman and friend from college, for help to immigrate. In early 1941, he wrote of the families’ 1938 application and said he felt America was the only place his family could be safe.

“I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see USA is the only country we could go to,” Frank wrote in the April letter. By June, their hopes of emigration were crushed when both the US and Germany ordered the closures of their corresponding foreign consulates.

Within a year, the Franks had gone into hiding, where they were later joined by another Jewish family, the Van Pelses. They hid for more than two years, before the group was discovered on 9 August 1944. Only Otto Frank survived the deportations to various concentration camps with Anne Frank dying in Bergen-Belsen in 1945 at the age of 15.

“The conclusion must be that both the Frank and van Pels families’ attempts were not successful because of the rapidly growing numbers of applicants for a small number of openings on the quota lists; the unwillingness of the president, State Department and Congress (or the American people) to open immigration beyond the limits set by the 1924 quota laws or to endeavor to fill these quotas; and, eventually, the impact of the war on the possibility of escape,” Broek and Erbelding wrote in the report, which was based on correspondence between Otto Frank and his friends as well as documents provided to the US authorities.



Following the publication of the report last week, Jewish groups have warned of potential contemporary parallels. Melanie Nezer, an official with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish non-profit that helps resettle refugees, pointed to Donald Trump’s travel ban and gutting of refugee resettlement programs.

“These nationality-based bans echo the policies that kept people from German-occupied countries out of the United States beginning in 1941,” she told HuffPost via email. “Even though they were not explicitly the target of these policies, Jews were particularly impacted by them.”