The file, originally in the hands of the National Refugee Service, was turned over to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York in 1974 along with tens of thousands of other files from private Jewish refugee agencies.

It was not until 2005 that YIVO got a grant to organize and index the 350 file cabinets of material it had stored in an off-site facility. In the summer of that year, Estelle Guzick, a part-time volunteer, was sorting through papers when she saw a file jacket was missing the owner's date of birth, said Carl Rheins, YIVO's executive director. He said she opened it and saw that the children's names were Anne and Margot Frank.

YIVO kept the find under wraps until Wednesday to straighten out the complicated legal questions of confidentiality and copyright, Rheins said. The Anne Frank Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, controls most of the Franks' estate.

The papers are now available to scholars at YIVO's library on West 16th Street.

If there is one face that evokes the immeasurable loss from the Holocaust, it is Anne Frank's. Her daily account of hiding in an Amsterdam building before her imprisonment and death in Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945, at 15, has become a worldwide literary and historical landmark. Given the extraordinary efforts to preserve Anne's legacy by her father, the only member of the family to survive the concentration camps, the discovery of the neglected file is particularly surprising.

The documents show how Otto Frank, his brothers-in-law, his friends and refugee agencies tried to navigate the bewildering maze of regulations that included gathering sponsors, large sums of money and proof of how their entry would benefit America. Even the assistant secretary of state at the time, Adolf Berle, despaired of the confusion. He wrote in a letter 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.

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"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."

Richard Breitman, a historian at American University, explained that after France fell to the Germans in the summer of 1940, fears grew in America that a fifth column of spies and saboteurs would be dispatched from Europe. As a State Department. memorandum dated May 2, 1941, declared: "At a time like this, when the safety of the country is imperiled, it seems fully justifiable to resolve any possible doubts in favor of the country, rather than in favor of the aliens concerned."

By June 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. That development ended the possibility of getting the Frank girls out through a children's rescue agency.

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Soon after, Germany closed American consulates throughout its territories. As the exchange of letters show, Otto Frank would have had to get an exit permit out of the Netherlands, and transit visas for a series of Nazi-occupied countries to one of the four neutral areas where America still had consular offices.

By the end of the summer, they realized it was hopeless. "I am afraid, however, the news is not good news," Straus wrote to Otto Frank on July 1, 1941.

Frank then tried to get to Cuba, a risky, expensive and often corrupt process. "The only way to get to a neutral country are visas or others States such as Cuba," he said in a letter to Straus on Sept. 8. On Oct. 12, 1941, he wrote, "It is all much more difficult as one can imagine and is getting more complicated every day."

Because of the uncertainty, Otto Frank decided to try for a single visa for himself. It was granted and forwarded to him on Dec. 1. No one knows if it arrived. Ten days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States and Havana canceled the visa.

The last few papers in the file date from June 1945 to 1946. They include letters from Otto's brother-in-law, Julius Hollander, who was trying to locate the Franks and arrange for them to emigrate to the United States. There is a brief notification that Hollander's sister, Edith Frank, died and her daughters, Margot and Anne, are missing. What follows is a letter from Hollander saying that Otto Frank was staying in Amsterdam and no longer wanted to come to the United States.