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.
8
Prinsengracht 263
On December 1, 1940, seven months after the German invasion, Otto Frank moved his business to new premises at Prinsengracht 263. Opekta and Pectacon were stabilizing, and sales were satisfactory. He’d chosen a seventeenth-century house facing the canal and around the corner from the Westerkerk, the imposing church where Rembrandt van Rijn is buried. The street was occupied by small businesses, warehouses, and modest commercial factories, sometimes with apartments above.
Number 263 was a typical Amsterdam structure with a warehouse area on the ground floor and offices and storerooms in the three stories above. Like many of the period buildings, it had a four-story annex attached at the rear. The warehouse floor ran the entire length of the building, including under the Annex, with double-door street access to Prinsengracht and courtyard access at the rear. This meant that the Annex, though invisible from the front of the building, could be seen from the back, which abutted on a very large interior courtyard. Dozens of neighbors on the other three sides of the courtyard had a view of the Annex.
About five weeks before the move to the new premises, on October 22, 1940, the Germans passed a law that all industrial and commercial firms owned in whole or in part by Jews had to be registered with the Economic Inspection Agency （Wirtschaftsprüfstelle）。 Failure to report meant a large fine and five years in prison. Otto knew that it was the first step in the “de-Judification” and expropriation of his companies. He subverted the Germans by having Victor Kugler and Miep’s husband, Jan, become managing director and supervisory director of the renamed Pectacon, which was Aryanized as Gies & Co., a thoroughly Dutch name. Had the company remained Jewish, it would have been liquidated under the directive of a German trust company and the money deposited with the Lippmann-Rosenthal bank. But Otto’s company was never plundered. It had become Dutch.