Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, tried unsuccessfully to get visas to escape Nazi-occupied Holland and flee to America or Cuba.

Documents released yesterday by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research show how restrictive American immigration policies hindered the family’s attempts to flee, despite having powerful connections. Found in the summer of 2005 by a YIVO volunteer, most of the file covers April 30, 1941, nearly a year after Germany invaded the Netherlands, to December 11, 1941, when Germany declared war on America.

“I would not ask if conditions here would not force me to do all I can in time to be able to avoid worse,” Otto Frank wrote in April 1941 to Nathan Straus Jr. of the Macy’s department store family, who was head of the U.S. Housing Authority. They had been college friends since meeting decades earlier at Heidelberg University. Straus and others made appeals to the National Refugee Service and the State Department. The efforts were to no avail, given the large number of refugees seeking entry and the tightening of U.S. immigration policy.

“National security fears overrode humanitarian concerns,” the executive director of YIVO, Carl Rheins, told The New York Sun. He said the State Department and FBI were worried about an influx of foreigners during wartime. Mr. Rheins said refugees faced hurdles of having to obtain visas as well as signed affidavits showing financial support to evince that they would not be a burden once in America.

Anne Frank’s is one of the most well known accounts of the Holocaust. Her diary, written between 1942 and 1944, describes how she and her family hid in her father’s office building in Amsterdam. She and her sister, Margot, perished of typhus at Bergen-Belsen, and their mother died of starvation at Auschwitz. Otto Frank was liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945.

The file shows Otto Frank’s testimony that he had made an initial attempt at Rotterdam to get visas in 1938. He first wrote to Straus for help in immigrating to America in April 1941. That September, Otto Frank wrote to Straus to look into obtaining visas for Cuba. Although the Cuban government issued one visa on December 1, the Cuban visa was canceled 10 days later when Germany declared war on America. The family went into hiding the following July.

Mr. Rheins said the documents are typical of the experience of thousands of other Czech, Austrian, German, French, and Dutch Jews who found themselves desperately trying to find sanctuary from the Nazi orbit.