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New documents detail Anne Frank family’s doomed escape attempts
U.S. national security fears helped keep Anne Frank from escaping the Nazis, revealed AU history professor Richard Breitman at a February press conference covered by the New York Times and Washington Post.
The recently discovered letters between Anne’s father, Otto Frank, and friends abroad show that in addition to the effort to hide detailed in The Diary of Anne Frank, the Frank family pursued doomed plans to escape to either the United States or Cuba.
AU’s Breitman and New York University professor David Engel were asked to help make sense of the letters unearthed in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research a year and a half ago.
The prominent U.S. figures involved in the Franks’ failed escape reveal how difficult it was for Jews to flee the Nazis. Breitman says the documents indicate, for instance, that Otto Frank’s American college friend, Nathan Straus, whose connections reached all the way to the White House, played a big role in the desperate emigration efforts. “This was somebody who was head of the Federal Housing Authority, which had a budget of $800 million in 1941, and who knew Eleanor Roosevelt pretty well personally,” said Breitman. “The fact that he wasn’t able to get his friend’s family into the United States was a little surprising.”
What stood in the way of the Franks’ emigration was a tightening of U.S. State Department regulations in response to national security concerns. “There was a general belief that even if they left . . . people might still be loyal to [the Nazis],” said Breitman. “So the notion that Jews were victims got twisted with the notion that they might be collaborators as well.”
No stranger to reviewing uncovered documents, Breitman is one of four historians working with the U.S. government to study the nearly 150 million documents released by the 1999 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. Yet even with his vast experience on the subject, Breitman admitted that reading Frank family letters revealing the unsuccessful escape plans felt both tragic and surreal. “I came away from reading through the whole set of documents realizing,” he said, that if things had gone a little differently, “Anne Frank could today be a 77-year-old writer living in Boston.” |
