Desperate to leave Amsterdam with his family in 1941, Otto Frank, not yet in hiding with Edith, Anne, and Margot, sought assistance from an old friend, Nathan Straus Jr., whom he had met in Heidelberg 33 years earlier. Straus had been put in charge of the New Deal’s Federal Housing Authority, where he superintended an $800 million budget for public housing. But his effort to secure visas for the Franks failed. “The State Department,” Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman observe, “had already cut off most visas to Jews.”
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