QUILLBLOG

Battling bureaucracy

The New York Times has more details of the recently discovered letters from Anne Frank’s father, Otto, written as he desperately tried to find a way to get his family out of Amsterdam and into the U.S. His college friend Nathan Straus Jr. was trying to assist him, but the correspondence reveals that they were fighting against mounting bureaucratic obstacles.

Each page adds a layer of sorrow as the tortuous process for gaining entry to the United States — involving sponsors, large sums of money, affidavits and proof of how their entry would benefit America — is laid out. The moment the Franks and their American supporters overcame one administrative or logistical obstacle, another arose.

Even the assistant secretary of state at the time, Adolf A. Berle Jr., despaired of the bewildering maze of regulations. As Richard Breitman, a historian at American University, pointed out in a separate background paper, Berle wrote in January 1941 that some consulates ask for a trust fund. “Others ask for affidavits. One particularly shocking case stated that nothing would be accepted save from a relative in the United States under a legal obligation to support the applicant,” he said. “It does seem to me that this Department could pull itself together sufficiently to get out a general instruction which would be complete enough and simple enough so that the procedure could be standardized.”

So, should the deaths of Anne Frank, her mother and sister, and countless others, be laid at the feet of bureaucratic inefficiencies and bungling? Maybe, but The Times article sheds some light on what might have been the underlying cause of the mess:

Mr. Breitman explained that after France fell to the Germans in June 1940, fears grew in the United States of a potential fifth column of spies and saboteurs peopled by European refugees. By June of 1941, no one with close relatives still in Germany was allowed into the United States because of suspicions that the Nazis could use them to blackmail refugees into clandestine cooperation.

Bureaucracy as an expression and screen for fear and racism seems likely.

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