Posted on 02/20/2007 5:43:48 AM PST by SJackson
A new chapter in the teenager's tragic saga.
Anne Frank's family tried to escape the Nazis by immigrating to America - but they were turned away.
This extraordinary new chapter in the teenager's tragic saga emerges from seventy-eight newly-discovered documents from the correspondence of Anne's father, Otto Frank. They detail his efforts, in 1941, to gain permission to bring his family to the United States.
The new correspondence presents an opportunity - and an obligation - to tell the rest of the story.
At the time of the correspondence, the Franks were living in exile in Holland, having fled their native Germany after Hitler's rise to power. By 1939, with anti-Semitism spreading throughout Europe, the Franks began thinking about how to get to America. Otto had already lived in the US from 1909 to 1911, working as an intern at Macy's Department Store, in New York City.
But by 1939, it was a different America. After World War I, in response to the public's intense anti-foreigner sentiment, Congress had enacted restrictive immigration quotas. The quota system was structured to reduce "undesirable" immigrants, especially Italians and Jews. The original version of the immigration bill had been introduced in Congress with a report by the chief of the United States Consular Service, Wilbur Carr, characterizing Jewish immigrants as "filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits... lacking any conception of patriotism or national spirit."
The new annual quota for Germany and Austria allowed a maximum of 27,370 immigrants - far fewer than the hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian Jews searching for haven from Hitler.
Remarkably, even those meager quota allotments were almost always under-filled. American consular officials abroad were directed by Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long to "postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas" to refugees. They created a bureaucratic maze - "paper walls," to borrow the phrase of David S. Wyman - to keep refugees far from America's shores.
And so, during the period of the Nazi genocide, from late 1941 until early 1945, only ten percent of the quotas from Axis-controlled European countries would actually be used. Almost 190,000 quota places remained unused - representing almost 190,000 lives that could have been saved, even under the restrictive quotas.
Anne's mother, Edith, wrote to a friend in 1939: "I believe that all Germany's Jews are looking around the world, but can find nowhere to go."
In May 1940, the Germans conquered and occupied the Netherlands. Emigration was forbidden and the Franks' hopes of going to America appeared to be dashed.
But they didn't give up. In 1941, Otto began writing to his American friends and relatives, and to US officials, in the hope of securing permission to immigrate. But at the same time the Franks were seeking shelter in America, State Department officials were seeking new ways to shut the nation's doors even tighter. In the summer of 1941, Breckinridge Long implemented new procedures to further reduce the number of immigrants.
Long had the full backing of President Roosevelt. When refugee advocate James G. McDonald appealed to FDR against Long's policies, the president dismissed his pleas as "sob stuff."
As a result of the new restrictions, less than half of the German-Austrian quota places were used in 1941.
Otto and Edith Frank, and their daughters Margot and Anne, were turned away by the United States that year. Not because the quotas were full. Not because this successful middle-class couple and their two young daughters would have been a burden to American society. But simply because so many Americans considered Jewish refugees undesirable, and because too many politicians feared losing votes if more Jews were admitted.
Today, Anne Frank has become the best-known victim of the Holocaust to people all over the world, especially as the subject is taught to schoolchildren. Anne's diary of the two years that her family hid in an attic to elude the Germans is the centerpiece of classroom instruction about the Nazi genocide. The betrayal of the Franks, and their final months in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, provide the grim climax to a story that represents the fate of millions of Jewish victims.
But now a new chapter must be added to the Anne Frank saga. The new correspondence presents an opportunity - and an obligation - to tell the rest of the story. Every sixth-grade student in America needs to know that Anne's death was not inevitable. The Franks were turned away from America by callous bureaucrats and politicians, even though there was room in the immigration quotas.
We need to teach our children why America cast aside its proud tradition of welcoming "the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and closed its doors. Only then can we hope that such moral failures are not repeated by the next generation.
Story's like the Frank's and another about a cruise liner filled with Jews that I believe got to our shores and was turned away show an interesting comparison with todays attitude.We wouldn't let people in the 1930's and 40's into the USA even to save their lives.Today we let people come in illegally for any reason good or bad,and don't even try to stop it !!!
Europe, through post WWI punishment followed by the appeasement of growing aggression, allowed this regime to flourish and wreak the continent. We suffered 400,000+ war dead in WWII, brought the war to an end, and then stayed on for the reconstruction.
In a time of war, I'd say it's safe to assume that allowing immigrants in from the war zone is going to be heavily controlled and erring on the side of safety and caution for our own nation.
Depending on who's counting we are the #1 or #2 country for Jewish population on the planet.
Of course if you're set on hating on the USA from the inside or out, please don't let facts stand in your way.
What was Democrat Senator Robert Long doing while all this was going on?
Why?
How did your grandmother escape her family's fate?
The new annual quota for Germany and Austria allowed a maximum of 27,370 immigrants - far fewer than the hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian Jews searching for haven from Hitler.
And so what? Every German and Austrian Jew who wanted to leave Germany and Austria before the war (in excess of 90%) got out. Some came to the US, others went to Britain. More went to places like Belgium, the Netherlands and especially France, countries that would later be conquered by the Nazis, and were subsequently killed. But you can't fault the Americans for not predicting that France (which in 1939 had the largest and best equipped army in Europe) would fall to the Germans at all, let alone in a month.
And so, during the period of the Nazi genocide, from late 1941 until early 1945, only ten percent of the quotas from Axis-controlled European countries would actually be used.
By late 1941, the US was at war with Germany and it was almost impossible for Jews to get out. Those who did (including myself) survived. End of story.
After intense research by a crack team of journalists, the party affiliation of FDR was usable to be established....
That's a complete fabrication. You are referring, of course, to the St. Louis. The St. Louis did NOT return to Nazi Germany. Virtually all the Jews on board went to France. France, in 1939, had the largest, most modern and best equipped army in Europe. With the gift of hindsight, we now know that France would be conquered by the Germans. But nobody knew that in 1939. Refusing to accept illegal immigrants, and instead turning them over to a friendly government with an army of 1.5 million hardly seems like abandonment.
Moreover, in 1939, the Germans were still mainly harassing and trying expel their Jewish population. This was still three years before the Holocaust began.
I agree with you. There are many who would blame the US for the Holocaust. This is nonsense. The Germans, and their collaborators in occupied Europe are 100% responsible. I think the record shows that the US (with only a few rare exceptions) did practically everything in its power to end the Holocaust as quickly as possible and minimize the killing of Jews and other peoples.
You may be hard-headed but certainly not brainwashed or simian. Good contra-counterfactual realism to your posts.
Correct. Additionally, while the author of this silly piece laments unclaimed visas, he ignores the fact that Jewish immigrants from Europe represented by far the largset portion of the immigration quota in 1939-1941. Far from being hostile to Jewish immigration, the US (which in the middle of the depression was as anti-immigration as it has ever been) vastly increased the number of quotas given to European Jews, at the expense of virtually all other immigrant groups. That's something to be enormously thankful of.
All this was still before the Holocaust started, before the Germans started exterminating Jews. By the time the death camps started, it was too late to do much of anything. But even then, the US sent secret agents behind German lines who risked their lives to save tens of thousands of Jews.
The S.S. St. Louis docked in Cuba in May of 1939 well before we had entered the war. The passengers had purchased illegal visas and the President of Cuba would not allow them to enter the country. Our State Dept. tried to intervene for the passengers. There were 936 passengers - 29 of them disembarked in Cuba.
With intervention from our State Dept. the ship was allowed to continue on to England where 288 people disembarked. The remaining 619 people disembarked in Antwerp from there the people went to Belgium, France and Holland. None of them were 'turned over to the Nazis'. Over 2/3rds of the passengers survived the Holocaust.
Married my grandfather and they left Russia. Her family was living in the Pale of Settlement....between Poland and Russia. She considered herself Polish.
That's the best compliment I've received or day! :-)
Anne Frank died during the Holocaust. I blame Bush!
There's a group of people who have spent the last 30 years building up the case that the US was partly responsible for letting the Holocaust happen. They have created an entire mythology of falsehoods, distortions and genuine misunderstandings. This mythology has been extremely successful and influential; nevertheless it is entirely wrong.
You're letting Pelosi off the hook? She's been Speaker for a month now -- and yet Anne Frank is still dead!
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