Could FDR Have Saved Anne Frank? Historian Looks Back At World War II Immigration Quotas
Visa programs that would have allowed families like the Franks to escape the Holocaust were not fully implemented, historian Rafael Medoff says.
Anne Frank, the Jewish girl famous for chronicling her experiences under Nazi rule in her diary, would have turned 90 this month. Frank was 15 years old when she died in a concentration camp in 1945.
Frank’s diary entries, written while she was in hiding with her family in the Netherlands, have been widely read around the world. But what is less known about her story is how Frank, and the millions of people like her trying to escape the Nazis, could have been saved — including by the United States — but weren’t.
For example, newsreels told of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s outrage, founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
