The Only Moving Film Footage of Anne Frank, Born June 12, 1929; Jewish Emigration

- Annelies Marie Frank, (12 June 1929 – c. Feb. or March 1945) was a German-born Jewish girl who kept a diary in which she documented life in hiding under Nazi persecution.

She is a celebrated diarist who described everyday life from her family hiding place in an Amsterdam attic. One of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she gained fame posthumously with the 1947 publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 -1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. It is one of the world's best-known books & has been the basis for several plays & films.

Anne was born in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1934, when she was 4 and a half, her family moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control over Germany. She spent most of her life in or around Amsterdam. By May 1940, the Franks were trapped in Amsterdam by the German occupation of the Netherlands. Anne lost her German citizenship in 1941 and became stateless.

As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, they went into hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase in the building where Anne's father, Otto Frank, worked.

Until the family's arrest by the Gestapo on 4 Aug. 1944, Anne kept a diary she had received as a birthday present, and wrote in it regularly. Following their arrest, the Franks were transported to concentration camps. On 1 Nov. 1944, Anne & her sister, Margot, were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died (probably of typhus) a few months later. They were originally estimated by the Red Cross to have died in March, with Dutch authorities setting 31 March as the official date. Later research has suggested they died in Feb. or early March.

Otto, the only survivor of the Frank family, returned to Amsterdam after the war to find that Anne's diary had been saved by his female secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl. He decided to fulfil Anne's greatest wish to become a writer and publish her diary in 1947. It was translated from its original Dutch version and 1st published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank
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-- The (im)possibilities of escaping. Jewish emigration 1933 – 1942. -- Anne Frank House website.

When Hitler came to power, many Jews wanted to flee Germany for fear of persecution. - Read here why emigration was difficult and about the role foreign countries played.

The appointment of Hitler as the German Chancellor on 30 Jan. 1933 resulted in a climax following a lengthy period of political unrest in Germany. The influence of his party, the NSDAP, & its extremist ideology increased significantly. There was no room for anyone with different ideas; from the very beginning, opponents of the regime were intimidated, persecuted & imprisoned in concentration camps. Many political & cultural dissidents therefore quickly left the country, whether they were Jewish or not; this 1st wave of emigrants or refugees included many writers, journalists & artists. There is a difference between emigrating & fleeing, but it is difficult to define the dividing line exactly.

- Jews are fleeing from Germany. - The NSDAP was anti-Semitic: Germany wanted to get rid of the Jews. By 1 April 1933 the party had already organized a boycott of Jewish businessmen & the liberal professions. In addition, anti-Semitic laws were passed. Many Jewish citizens left Germany in response to this. In the first days of April 1933 alone, hundreds left for Amsterdam.In Sept. 1935, the NSDAP issued extensive laws in the field of nationality & citizenship. These infamous “Nuremberg Race Laws” excluded Jews from German citizenship. Only Germans of “Germanic origin” could henceforth be German citizens. The inferior label “German subject” was reserved for Jews. James G. Macdonald, the High Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations, reported on the economic decline of a large number of the German Jews as a result of these measures and anticipated a new exodus.

- In search of a new home. - Between 1933 and 1937, a total of about 130,000 Jews left the national socialist Germany. Many left for South Africa, Palestine and Latin America. Many also went to Eastern Europe, particularly families who had moved to Germany from there previously. However, thousands remained in Northern & Western Europe. In a letter to an acquaintance in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Edith Frank complained at the end of 1937: “I think that all the German Jews are searching the world today and there is no room for them anymore.”...
https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/impossibilities-escaping-1933-1942/
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-- How Anne Frank’s Family Was Denied a Chance at U.S. Immigration -- VIDEO --

'Waitlists, bombings and restrictive U.S. immigration policies thwarted Anne Frank's family's chances of escaping the Holocaust,' History, Jan. 17, 2023.

Desperate to escape Nazi persecution during World War II, Anne Frank’s family tried repeatedly to flee to the United States before going into hiding in 1942, according to research published July 2018. However, the combination of Nazi rule, World War II bombing & American bias against accepting Jewish refugees ensured they never made it far enough through the application process. “The U.S. had no specific refugee policy prior to World War II,” write Rebecca Erbelding & Gertjan Broek, authors of research jointly published by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum & the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. “Those seeking to escape Nazi persecution in Europe, like the families of Otto Frank & Hermann van Pels, had to clear the same bureaucratic hurdles as other immigrants.”

The van Pels family hid from the Nazis in the same Amsterdam attic as the Franks. The Frank & van Pels families were living in the Netherlands when they applied to emigrate in the late 1930s. Because they had been born in Germany, all of the family members were German nationals at a time when the annual U.S. quota for German immigration was just under 26,000. But there was a huge waiting list to join that group, & the application process required a number of documents that, for persecuted Jewish people, were difficult—if not impossible—to obtain. -- A letter from Anne Frank’s father Otto reveals that he 1st applied for U.S. immigration visas as early as 1938, the year that Germany annexed Austria & Nazis terrorized Jewish citizens during Kristallnacht. At the time, many other Jewish families were trying to flee to the U.S., as well...https://www.history.com/news/anne-frank-family-immigration-america-holocaust