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.
*****And what could he have done? For better or worse, the US government decided that the best way to help the Jews was to win the war as quickly as possible. I think they were right on that point. The only suggestion offered was bombing the rail lines, but that would have been an ineffective and counter-productive solution for a number of reasons that I'm sure we'll get into.****
How would that have been counter productive?
As I see it bombing the rail lines would have slowed up the transport of thousands to the death camps.
That was the St. Louis. After the US turned the ship away, it cruised down the coast of the Americas looking for a safe port, and was turned away time and again. In the end, it sailed back to Europe and delivered its human cargo back into Hitler's hands.
Wouldn't have been substantially different, though a large number could have been saved. Palestine could have been far more important that 70,000 or so unused immigration slots to the US.
A much more important consideration than 70,000 immigration slots or a few hundred thousands who might have made it to Palestine.
There are many problems with this.
1. The US Army Air Force told the Administration that bombing the rail lines was impossible. Although today we know that bombers actually flew over Auschwitz on their way to other targets, this was not known at the time.
2. By the time bombing Auschwitz was feasible, most of the Jews were already dead.
3. Given the imprecise nature of WWII bombers, any bombing raid would necessarily kill a large number of Jews. There is no reason to believe that the small delay caused by damaging rail lines (easily replaced in a few hours to a few days) would have saved more Jews than the raids themselves would have killed.
4. Members of the American Jewish community advised the Administration not to attack Auschwitz, because it would been a propoganda victory for the Germans -- if the Americans were bombing Jews, the Nazis could have claimed that the Americans didn't care about Jews either. Whether or not this is plausible, it was believed at the time.
5. Most importantly, the decision was made that the most effective means of saving the Jews was to defeat the Germans as quickly as possible. Diverting resources to bombing Auschwitz likely would have had little effect, and it would have meant fewer resources would have been available for bombing military targets. Prolonging the war by even a day would have meant more dead Jews.
The ship was turned away from the U.S. with the knowledge that the passengers would probably be forced to return to Germany. Only after it got back to Europe were the refugees distributed about evenly among France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the U.K. Those in the first three countries largely died in the Holocaust but as you said, that wasn't predictable.
The U.S. didn't turn over the refugees to France, it simply washed its hands of them without concern for what would happen.
Many American's felt that way. The desire for isolation aside, in several speeches Lindburgh indicated his belief that America hadn't the capacity to defeat the Reich. A two front war wasn't contemplated. Needless to say the 1940s proved him wrong.
There is one thing he did do. In August 1944, a group of just under 1000 refugees, mostly Jewish, were allowed to enter the U.S. as "guests of FDR." They were housed in a refugee camp in Oswego, NY on the grounds of old Fort Ontario.
I grew up in Oswego (as a college brat -- I'm not related to the Safe Haven refugees). My understanding is that FDR only did this under a lot of pressure from Eleanor. And that there were other refugees he could have done this for, but was hesitant, because of politics.
Absolutely, categorically, false. Read the above posts for clarification. The passengers onboard the St. Louis went to Cuba, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Those countries welcomed the Jews with open arms. That France -- a country with a modern army of 1.5 million -- was conquered, was entirely unforseeable. This is silly revisionist nonsense that has somehow become mainstream thought.
That being said, anti-Antisemitism was strong in the US also.
It's America's fault - plain as day. Don't know why I didn't see it before.
Those democrats haven't changed one bit!
And where were those Jews from?
Not Germany. Not Poland. Not Hungary or France. They were Jews who had been living in Spain and allied-occupied portions of Southern Italy, where there was no Holocaust, and where their chances of being exterminated were effectively nil. It was easy to save Jews who did not need saving.
Saving those who did need saving was a bit tougher...
So did the fact that Mussolini had a Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, who was a major influence in his life.
Am not blaming the Allies for the murderous sins of the enemies.
But where there is not active resistance to evil or even not enough resistance, then evil will prevail until it is destroyed.
The PERCEPTION was that America would not actively aid England or France nor the invaded and raped countries in Asia and the South Pacific.
If not for Pearl Harbor, the perception would have been substantiated much longer - maybe to the point where the Axis powers could not have been stopped.
As it was, they got damn close to that point. More than almost all persons realize.
The Allies' victory in WWII was by no means assured; and the true cost remains really beyond conception.
For the most part, that's false too. A 1938 Gallup poll asked Americans, "Do you approve or disapprove of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany?" 6% approved, 94% disapproved.
I'll add that the November 1938 poll was conducted after Kristallnacht, during a period when Jews were harassed and expelled from schools and workplaces, but long before Jews were systematically interned or exterminated.
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