The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation(15)
When the deportations began, the Zentralstelle created a system of Sperres, or exemptions from deportation, and allowed the Jewish Council to make recommendations. Members of the council and their families automatically qualified for Sperres, and those who were selected were safe for a time. However, the system was rife with abuse. The line between cooperation and collaboration gradually grew thinner and thinner.7
Meanwhile, civic chaos continued in Amsterdam. On February 22, 1941, a Saturday afternoon and therefore the Sabbath, trucks with six hundred heavily armed members of the German Ordnungspolizei entered the sealed-off Jewish Quarter and randomly arrested 427 Jewish men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five.8 They were sent first to Kamp Schoorl in the Netherlands. Thirty-eight were returned to Amsterdam due to ill health. The remaining 389 were sent to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and some eventually to Buchenwald. Only two of them survived.
Three days later, on February 25, in protest against the roundup, Dutch workers staged a massive strike. Joined by three hundred thousand people, the strike lasted two days. Responding ruthlessly, the Nazis called in the Waffen-SS, which had permission to use live ammunition against the striking workers. Nine people were killed and twenty-four seriously wounded. The strike leaders were tracked down, and at least twenty were executed. Men from the Jewish Quarter who had been arrested were photographed with weapons in their hands. The photographs were published in the Dutch press as evidence that the German command was dealing with “an outbreak of terrorism.”9 If any Dutch had harbored illusions about what the German occupation might mean, they now lost them.
But German Jews had no such illusions. Otto Frank knew the Nazi drill: excluding Jews from air-raid shelters; banning Jews from employment; the Aryanization of businesses; the registration of Jews, who were forced to wear yellow stars; the confiscation of wealth and property; mass arrests; transit camps; and finally, the deportations to the east, where it was not clear what awaited them. Otto now put every ounce of his strength into the fight to save his family. He knew he had to secure his business and get out of the Netherlands.
He tried again for emigration to the United States. His wife’s brothers, Julius and Walter Holl?nder, had searched for almost a year before they had found work. Finally, Walter had gotten a laborer’s job at the E. F. Dodge Paper Box Company outside Boston and sent guarantees of support to the Netherlands for his mother, Rosa; Otto; and Edith. Remarkably, Walter’s boss, Jacob Hiatt, and a friend signed affidavits of support for Anne and Margot. It should have been a go, but a deposit of $5,000 for each immigrant was required to ensure that they would not become indigent.10 Neither Otto nor his brothers-in-law had that amount of money.
In April 1941, Otto wrote to his wealthy American friend Nathan Straus, Jr.; the Straus family owned Macy’s department store, and he and Nathan had been roommates at Heidelberg University. Though it must have been humiliating, Otto asked Straus for a character reference and the deposit, reminding his friend that he had two daughters and it was mainly for their sake that he was asking for help. Straus contacted the National Refugee Service, offering to provide the affidavits but suggesting that his influence was so strong that no deposit of $5,000 (the equivalent of approximately $91,000 today) should be necessary. By November 1941, with no visas to be had, Straus finally offered to cover all expenses, but it was too late.11
An internal memo from Undersecretary of State Breckinridge Long to his colleagues in June 1940 revealed the US policy. The strategy to control immigration (branding refugees as spies, Communists, and negative elements) was to “put every obstacle in the way and require additional evidence” to “postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”12 The US consulate in Rotterdam, where Otto had applied for a visa in 1938, had been destroyed during the 1940 bombing of the city, and all applicants needed to reapply since the original documents had been destroyed. Finally, in June 1941, saying that there was a risk of espionage cells, the United States closed most diplomatic embassies and consulates in Nazi-occupied territory. Otto would now have to go to a US consulate in a supposedly “nonbelligerent” country, such as Spain or unoccupied France, where he would apply in person for a visa. But he couldn’t leave the Netherlands without an exit permit, which he couldn’t get unless he had a visa to enter that other country. The whole system was deliberately roundabout. He was caught in the catch-22 of the bureaucratic nightmare of war.13
Otto never wavered in his efforts to save his family. Even as late as October 1941, he was trying for a Cuban visa, a risky and expensive venture that was often simply a swindle. In September, he wrote to a friend that Edith was urging him to leave either by himself or with the children. Perhaps once they were outside the country, he could buy their freedom. He finally did get a Cuban visa on December 1, but ten days later, on December 11, four days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States and the Cuban government canceled the visa.14
Otto’s last effort was an appeal to the Emigration Section of the Amsterdam Jewish Council on January 20, 1942. In the files of the Anne Frank Stichting in Amsterdam, there are four stenciled forms, one for each member of the family, requesting exit visas. They were never sent.
The Nazis were very efficient in “cleansing” Amsterdam of its Jews. There were eighty thousand Jewish inhabitants in Amsterdam in 1940, about 10 percent of the city’s total population. By September 1943, the city would be declared Jew free.