Otto Frank
Otto Frank escaped Nazi Germany with his wife and two daughters soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. They lived a peaceful life in Amsterdam until May 1940, when Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. Otto, determined to leave Europe with his family, contacted an old college friend in the United States for help.
The Frank family: (left to right): Margot, Otto, Anne, and Edith Frank, Amsterdam, 1941. Courtesy of the Anne Frank Fonds, Basel, Switzerland.
Otto’s Worries
In April 1941, Otto Frank was desperate. A decade earlier, he and his wife Edith had been happily living in Frankfurt, Germany, with their two young daughters, Margot and Anne. After experiencing the first wave of antisemitic attacks instigated by the new Nazi government, Otto and Edith decided in 1933 to move to the Netherlands for safety. After arriving in Amsterdam, Otto opened a company called Opekta, which manufactured products used for making jellies and jams, and his daughters started attending Dutch schools.
As the years passed, Frank watched with concern as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime grew more aggressive. He considered moving to Great Britain, but his efforts to establish a factory there failed. Frank added his family’s names to the waiting list for American immigration visas in 1938, joining 200,000 other people born in Germany who also wanted to escape to the United States.
Two years later, Otto Frank was still awaiting his turn to be interviewed by the US consulate for an immigration visa. On May 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Within days of the invasion, Nazi aircraft bombed Rotterdam, destroying the US consulate building—and with it, the visa waiting list. US State Department officials attempted to reconstruct the list, asking everyone who had applied for immigration to contact the consulate. For some reason, Frank does not seem to have put his family’s names back on the list.
On April 30, 1941, Otto Frank wrote to his old friend, Nathan Straus Jr. (whose friends called him “Charley”), the son of the founder of Macy’s department stores. The two men had met more than 30 years earlier, while Frank was in college in Heidelberg, and had become fast friends.
“I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see U.S.A. is the only country we could go to . . . You are the only person I know that I can ask: Would it be possible for you to give a deposit in my favor?”
Otto Frank wrote this letter to his old friend, Nathan Straus Jr., to ask for assistance immigrating to the United States with his family, April 30, 1941. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. Courtesy of the Anne Frank Fonds, Basel, Switzerland.
Page two of Otto Frank’s letter to Nathan Straus Jr. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. Courtesy of the Anne Frank Fonds, Basel, Switzerland.
Frantic Correspondence
Nathan Straus Jr. worked for President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. He had plenty of political contacts and enough wealth to sponsor the Frank family, and immediately told Otto that he would help.
Edith Frank’s two brothers, Julius and Walter Holländer, both of whom had been arrested by the Nazis during Kristallnacht, had already managed to immigrate from Germany to Boston, Massachusetts. Neither of them had enough money to assist the Franks directly, but they were eager to help Straus.
The three men corresponded with each other, working through the National Refugee Service, a US organization that helped Jewish refugees coordinate their immigration paperwork.
“Bad Luck”
On June 11, 1941, only six weeks after Frank first asked him, Straus signed five copies of an affidavit for the Frank family, agreeing to sponsor their immigration.
Five days later, the National Refugee Service informed Straus that the US State Department was implementing new rules, mandating that all immigration applications had to be approved in Washington, DC. This would delay the Frank family’s immigration for at least several months.
Newspapers announced worse news that same day: Germany had ordered US consulates in Nazi-occupied territory to close. On July 10, State Department officials in Rotterdam reported to Washington that they had destroyed their visa stamps and closed the consulate. Frank had not finished collecting the necessary paperwork before the consulate closed. Even if he managed to gather everything, the Franks would have had to travel through multiple Nazi-occupied countries to reach a US consulate for an interview. During World War II, this travel was almost impossible.
When Frank realized that his family would not be able to reach the United States, he responded stoically to Straus: “It is a pity that for the present all efforts will be useless as the American Consulate at Rotterdam is leaving . . . So we have to wait. Bad luck, but cannot be helped. Let us hope that conditions will get more normal again.”
After learning that Nazi Germany had ordered US consulates in the Netherlands to close, the Frank family’s hopes of immigrating to the United States ended. Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Courtesy of the Anne Frank Fonds, Basel, Switzerland.
Cuba?
On September 8, 1941, Otto Frank wrote to Nathan Straus again, this time raising the possibility of obtaining a tourist visa to Cuba. The chances of escape were slim: the Cuban consulate had also closed in the Netherlands. Frank heard rumors that he might obtain a Cuban visa in Spain or in Germany if he could get there. He also needed at least $2,825 (approximately $50,000 in 2018) for the visa fees and the bank deposit the Cuban government required. “I know that it will be impossible for us all to leave, even if most of the money is refundable, but Edith urges me to leave alone or with the children,” Frank wrote.
Straus agreed to provide the deposit for the Cuban visa, and Julius Holländer added, “My brother and I will pay for the boat ticket and Cuban visa for Mr. Frank. If you give the necessary deposit . . . I promise you that it will be returned to you untouched, as we will support my brother-in-law while he remains in Cuba.” By December, the Holländers and Straus had prepared the money for Otto Frank’s visa. Frank planned to see whether the Nazi authorities would permit him to leave the Netherlands if he had a Cuban visa. If Otto could emigrate safely, Straus would then try to obtain Cuban visas for Edith, Margot, and Anne Frank.
No Escape
On December 11, 1941, Julius Holländer telephoned the National Refugee Service to thank them for their assistance, but the efforts to help the Frank family immigrate had failed. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war against the United States, the Cuban government canceled Otto Frank’s visa application. It is likely that Cuban officials feared that German refugees would become stuck in Cuba indefinitely if the United States instituted even more national security screenings for new immigrants, or stopped accepting immigrants entirely.
Anne Frank’s first diary, which she kept while in hiding. Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
On July 6, 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in the attic annex above the Opekta offices. They were joined by Herman and Auguste Van Pels and their son Peter, and later by dentist Fritz Pfeffer, all of whom were Jewish. Anne Frank, who had received a diary for her 13th birthday several weeks earlier, spent the next two years documenting her experiences in hiding. On August 4, 1944, Dutch police discovered and arrested the residents hiding in the annex. The Franks, Van Pels, and Pfeffer were sent first to the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, and then placed on the final train sent from Westerbork to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Otto Frank was the only annex resident to survive the Holocaust. His wife Edith was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and daughters Margot and Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early spring 1945.
When Frank returned to Amsterdam after the war, one of his former employees, Miep Gies, who had helped the annex residents while they were in hiding, gave him his daughter Anne’s diary. Frank decided to publish it as The Secret Annex in 1947. Anne Frank’s diary has since been published in at least 70 languages and has become the most famous testimony of the Holocaust.