Researchers at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum have revealed a discovery that suggests that US bureaucracy, the long list of requirements that have to be met by applicants and the annual immigration quota were among the reasons behind the tragic fate of the famous diarist Anne Frank and her family.
The investigation carried out by the researchers reveals that Anne Frank's father Otto had applied at least twice for a US visa and once for a Cuban one. He had to present a lot of paperwork, such as birth certificates, wedding certificates, tax clearances and even affidavits from relatives or friends in the US in order to get one of 30,000 annual visas. At the same time, total number of visa applications to the US had reached hundreds of thousands by that year.
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The process was further derailed by huge bureaucratic hurdles in the US that slowed down the reviewing process for applicants, the researchers pointed out. An air raid that devastated the US consulate in the Netherlands where Otto had filed his application along with his papers also contributed to the failure of the Frank family to get visas.
After Anne Frank's family lost their hope to get visas, they went into hiding. It was then that she began to write her famous diary, which later exposed some of the horrors of Nazism. Eventually the girl's family was discovered and sent to Auschwitz. Anne Frank was later separated from her family and transported to another camp, where she died at the age of 15 in a typhus epidemic.