Anne Frank was a Refugee Who Was Denied Entrance to the United States

[ehrnst]

"According to documents discovered in 2012, Anne’s father wrote numerous letters to U.S. officials pleading for permission to immigrate with his family. Most of these were written between April and December of 1941, in the months following the Nazi’s occupation of the Netherlands, where the Frank family had been exiled.

At the end of 1941, after the family’s pleas were ignored, the Franks would go into hiding for two years, until they were eventually discovered and sent to Auschwitz. In 1945, Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camps."

"Following World War I, Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which set up a quota system that discouraged the immigration of Jews, Italians and other “undesirables.” For anyone following the GOP primaries, the rhetoric here will ring familiar: Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, told Congress that new immigrants were polluting the country’s bloodline with “feeblemindedness, insanity, criminality, and dependency.

Despite the existence of this harsh, racist quota, things managed to get worse in the years leading up to World War II. At the behest of American consular officials and the Assistant Secretary of State, a bureaucratic maze was constructed to ensure that even the meager quota remain unreached. The political “paper wall” was bolstered by the public, as anti-semitism spread throughout the United States along with the fear that the Jews had been infiltrated by Hitler’s spies. Between 1941 and 1945—the height of the Nazi regime’s systematic killing—90% of the available spots were unused, translating to nearly 190,000 lives that went unsaved."

http://historybuff.com/anne-frank-was-a-refugee-who-was-denied-entrance-to-the-united-states/

[geomon666]

1. I didn't know about this.

I feel sick to my stomach. We have learned nothing.

[MBS]

3. " " "

The (at the time) antisemitic US State Dept was shamelessly unhelpful to Jewish refugees in WW II. .only through the persistent efforts by Treasury Sec. Morgenthau -including his direct appeals to FDR- was there any significant (and sadly belated) success in bringing Jewish refugees to the US. My own family had tried desperately to rescue a Jewish friend - they tried everything, including direct appeals to good friends on the staff of the US Embassy in the central European country where their Jewish friend was being held. Tragically, no luck, despite my parents' personal link to Embassy staff, and their prodigious persuasive activist skills.

A shameful moment in our history.
And, as you said, we have learned nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgenthau,_Jr.

Once confronted by the Holocaust, the Allied Powers reacted slowly. In 1943, Morgenthau's Treasury Department approved the World Jewish Congress' plan to rescue Jews through the use of blocked accounts in Switzerland, but the State Department and the British Foreign Office procrastinated further. Morgenthau and his staff persisted in bypassing State and ultimately confronting Roosevelt in January 1944. He obtained the presidential creation of the US War Refugee Board in January 1944. The Board sponsored the Raoul Wallenberg mission to Budapest and allowed an increasing number of Jews to enter the U.S. in 1944 and 1945; as many as 200,000 Jews were saved in this way.[14]

Hurwitz (1991) argues that in late 1943, the Treasury Department drafted a report calling for the creation of a special rescue agency for European Jewry. At the same time, several congressmen connected with the "Bergson Boys" introduced a resolution also calling for the creation of such an agency. On January 16, 1944, Morgenthau presented Roosevelt with the Treasury report, and the president agreed to create the War Refugee Board (WRB), the first major attempt of the United States to deal with the annihilation of European Jews.

Blum argues that by mid-1944, the War Refugee Board" ad begun to fulfill Morgenthau's high expectations. His experience in getting the board established and in helping to oversee its operations constituted his signal wartime success to that date in nurturing humanitarian purpose in American foreign-policy.[15]"

[ehrnst]

2. "The fear that the Jews had been infiltrated by Hitler’s spies."

That's what I posted to a Jewish friend's FB page when she was angry about people comparing WW2 Jewish refugees with the Syrian refugees - "Jews didn't have bomb vests, did they?"

They thought Jews would bring spies with them, just as some of our wonderful Governors think the Syrians will bring ISIS.

How many more "Anne Franks" will be lost?