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.
Because in the heart of the depression, the American people were almost universally against another foreign war. Moreover, there is little the US could have done. In 1939, the US had a smaller army than Rumania.
It's fair and accurate to say that the US military and government knew more about the "final solution" than they told the public during the war. Critics claim that the Allies could have and should have bombed the camps, the rail lines leading to them, and so on.
Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall, and that crowd reached the strategic decision that the best way to end the genocide was to crush the Reich and win the war quickly and decisively. It's hard to fault that conclusion. Bombing Auschwittz would have slowed the slaughter, but not stopped it; sending the Nazis to the dustbin of history and Hitler to hell was the only way to bring the Shoah to an end. That was the plan they chose, and that's what they did.
This mythology has been extremely successful and influential; nevertheless it is entirely wrong.
I agree that it's entirely wrong. I disagree that it's been extremely successful and influential. I believe that the prevailing view is that the US and the Allies did a great deal of good, but could have done better and should have done it sooner, That does not diminish the good; it's something we should note and learn from.
Actually, they were mostly from Nazi occupied countries. They had escaped, I think first to Yugoslavia. When they first landed in Italy, they were just in time for the town they landed in to be shelled, then searched by the Nazis.
The Jews in France today dare not go out in public with any kind of indication of their religion such as a skull cap.
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The Vichy government in France during the Second World War was complicit in rounding up French Jews and deporting them to the death camps.
True, but remember that the American Jewish community was in many ways against widespread publication of information on the Holocaust, because they thought it would engender a backlash. The last thing American Jews wanted was to create the perception that the war was a "Jewish" war.
Moreover, the public was deeply suspicious of attrocities claims, following (false) reports of Germans bayonetting Belgian babies in the First World War. If you want to fault the US Government for not making what they knew of the Holocaust more widely known, you can do so, but I think they felt they had good reasons for not doing so.
On everything else, of course, I think we agree.
"Yes it is wrong, but don't dump them on us!"
That France -- a country with a modern army of 1.5 million -- was conquered, was entirely unforseeable.
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Anybody with a quarter of a brain realizes that France will surrender to anyone or anything. Heck, the Energizer Bunny can defeat France.
I'm not sure how that contradicts my post. By the time they left Italy for Oswego, there weren't any Germans anywhere nearby. They certainly wasn't any threat of them being deported from an area under firm Allied control. I'm not an expert in the Oswego camp, and I will read further, but this is my understanding.
Fascinating post, but France fought rather stubbornly in World War I (in which it notably did not surrender), and its army was comparably much stronger at the outset of World War II. France lost because of tactical and strategic blunders that nobody foresaw
Aside from the 29 who disembarked in Cuba, that's back in Hitler's hands. Later than sooner, in the case of France, Belguim and the Netherlands, but the same eventual outcome.
Was it foreseeable that the Nazis would do an end-run around the impenetrable Maginot Line? That's certainly open to debate. But if the St. Louis passengers had been allowed entry into the United States, far fewer would have been murdered.
Can you read? If you are going to bypass people's points, then why bother replying at all?
Something we can say easily in hindsight, but not something that anybody knew at the time. You can't blame anybody for not predicting that Hitler would conquer all of Europe before the Second World War actually started.
The German Jews from the St. Louis who wound up in France, protected by an army of 1.5 milllion, did not believe they were going to their deaths, and neither did anybody else.
But if the St. Louis passengers had been allowed entry into the United States, far fewer would have been murdered.
True but meaningless. They were illegal immigrants, other countries were willing to take them, and the US government didn't have many effective soothsayers at the time.
Joe Kennedy was anti-English, that's clear. But to pretend that Kennedy is responsible for the Second World War (by somehow inhibiting US efforts to back the UK), seems more than slightly hyperbolic.
Absolutely. Strategic and political considerations came into play. The Allies decided that the best way to end the Shoah was to win the war, and I'm loath to second-guess that judgment. The Nazis committed the Holocaust. second-guessing the Allies in 20/20 hindsight does not lift one ounce of the weight from the Nazis' shoulders.
If you want to fault the US Government for not making what they knew of the Holocaust more widely known, you can do so, but I think they felt they had good reasons for not doing so.
The Allies determined -- and rightly so -- that the best way to stop the horror was to win the war. Slam it shut, nail it down, and hang the mf'ers responsible. If there's any question, it isn't whether they were right, but how we could do it better and faster next time.
Next time? Either we're waiting for it, or we're in it.
This is a new perspective on the Kennedy curse.
And underscores the admonition in Genesis that "I (God) will bless them that bless you (Israel) and curse them who curse you."
Anti-foreign and anti-Jewish sentiment being taken into account (although those are the asserted reasons for the quotas, it's not clear that there was any particular animus against Frank), I still think it would be a little difficult for the US to entertain taking mass immigration from Europe after the war had begun. There would be serious espionage issues.
I'm also curious as to why Otto Frank worked for 2 years in the US and left. At the time, it was a fairly long journey and it would seem to be a waste to just stay for 2 years.
It is easy to forget what filthy sons of bitches the British were in places like "Palestine" and India in those days.
Since that time, the British have lost their Empire, and, having made "nice" with the Arabs and Muslims, are in the process of loseing their country.
One could argue that they, too, have come under a curse.
Last week Tom Tancredo said Iraqis whose lives are in danger because they helped us should be denied entry.
Some things never change.
Alter, I didn't know that about your past. God bless you.
And it's a very true observation about France.
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