Anne Frank’s family tried in vain to flee to the US

A portrait of Anne Frank stands in front of a black marble wall with the names of the Hungarian holocaust victims at the memorial of Central Europe's first Holocaust museum in Budapest on January 27, 2014.

The efforts of Anne Frank’s family to emigrate to the United States were thwarted by “American bureaucracy, war, and time,” historians say.

New joint research by the Anne Frank House and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum indicates the family applied for American visas twice and Anne’s father, Otto Frank, applied for a Cuban visa. But these efforts were undermined by suspicious and skeptical immigration officials, wartime events and endless bureaucratic hurdles here and in Europe.

“I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see the USA is the only country we could go to,” Otto Frank wrote in a letter to a friend living in New York.

Anne was 13 when she went into hiding from the Nazis with her family in the “Secret Annex,” a hidden enclave at the back of her father’s former office in Amsterdam, Netherlands. After her family was arrested by the German secret police in 1944, she was taken to a concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, where she died shortly before the end of World War II.

She kept a diary throughout her time in hiding, and after her death, her father published it in 1947. The book remains one of the world’s best-read, and it transformed a young girl who had perished in the Holocaust into a potent symbol. An English version, The Diary of a Young Girl, was issued in 1952.

Based on new documents and interviews, the museums’ historians said the family appears to have collected numerous documents around 1938 and filed visa applications at the US consulate in Rotterdam, Netherlands – the only one in the country issuing visas.

But the consulate was destroyed in 1940 during a German bombardment as the family waited for an answer.

Friday, August 1, 2014, marked the 70th anniversary of Anne Frank's final diary entry. Three days later, she was arrested with her family in the "secret annex" of a house in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where they had hidden for two years. She later died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp when she was 15. In her diary, Anne describes a 1942 picture of herself: "This is a photo as I would wish myself to look all the time. Then I would maybe have a chance to come to Hollywood." Click through the gallery to see other pages from her diary:

For her 13th birthday, Anne Frank received a red plaid diary, her first journal. She brought it with her into hiding and began writing in it in 1942. After her death, her father, Otto Frank, edited and compiled the diary. It was published in the Netherlands in 1947 as "The Secret Annex. Diary Letters From June 14, 1942, to August 1, 1944."

Pages with text and photos from Anne Frank's diary, written in October 1942.

A handwritten page of Anne Frank's diary includes photos of herself on the beach during a holiday with her sister, Margot. The two sisters would live hidden in the annex with their mother, Edith; father, Otto; and another family.

Two pages, written in 1942, from the diary. "Her inner life and her voice seem almost shockingly contemporary, astonishingly similar to the voices of the teenagers we know," says Francine Prose, author of "Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife."

When her diary was almost full, Anne continued writing, using several notebooks. In 1944, she decided to rewrite her diary entries in the form of a novel, intending to publish it after the war, according to curators at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Shown here are the different versions of her diary, known now as versions A, B and C.

"The Diary of Anne Frank" has been translated into more than 70 languages in more than 60 nations.

Anne Frank in 1941. Her diary is often many young people's introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Anne Frank: The girl who wanted to write

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When the consulate reopened, the family was not denied entry to the US. Instead, new findings show their application was never processed, historians said.

Otto Frank started anew to collect the paperwork needed for their visas and even asked his friend in the US for help to speed the process but once again, the war intervened and his effort was interrupted.

With the German invasion of western Europe, applications spiked. Immigration rules became stricter and finally the American consulate in the Netherlands as well as those in German-occupied Europe were closed in retaliation for the US closing German diplomatic offices. What’s more, American public opinion was not in favor of more immigrants, particularly from Germany. This stemmed in part from suspicion of spy infiltration.

Otto Frank then turned his attention to Cuba, where he hoped to use admission to the island as a “jumping board to the United States,” the new report says.

That application was later canceled, four days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

“Those seeking to escape Nazi persecution in Europe, like the families of Otto Frank and Hermann van Pels, had to clear the same bureaucratic hurdles as other immigrants,” the historians wrote.