Anne Frank Diary Co-Authored by Father

The Basel, Switzerland, Anne Frank Fonds (Anne Frank Fund)—which controls the copyright to the Diary of Anne Frank—has admitted that the book was in fact at least co-authored by Otto Frank, Anne’s father, after the war.

The admission proves that the book, which is still heavily promoted as a “holocaust memoir,” is in fact largely a postwar fabrication which contained parts of the young Anne’s diary with extensive additions added by her father.

This is obvious from even a cursory look at the actual diary. See, for example, the image below of two pages from the diary, which shows both Anne’s real youthful handwriting and her father’s obviously adult handwriting—although he signs his entries as “Anne Frank.”

The difference between Otto Frank's adult writing, and Anne Frank's juvenile handwriting, is obvious from this "original" diary page. Note the inscription top left, in Otto Frank's handwriting, signed as "Anne Frank."

As the New York Times has pointed out, when “Otto Frank first published his daughter’s red-checked diary and notebooks, he wrote a prologue assuring readers that the book mostly contained her words, written while hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex of a factory in Amsterdam.”

Normal copyright on books extends only 70 years after the author’s death. As Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen Belsen in February 1945, the book theoretically entered the public domain in February 2015.

But, as the New York Times went on to say, the Anne Frank Fonds has now decided to try to extend copyright on the book past the 70 year cut-off period—by admitting that Otto Frank, who died in 1980, was indeed a “co-author” after all.

The implications of this admission are obvious. As the New York Times put it:

While the foundation, the Anne Frank Fonds, in Basel, signaled its intentions a year ago, warnings about the change have provoked a furor as the deadline approaches. Some people opposed to the move have declared that they would defy the foundation and publish portions of her text.

Foundation officials “should think very carefully about the consequences,” said Agnès Tricoire, a lawyer in Paris who specializes in intellectual property rights in France, where critics have been the most vociferous and are organizing a challenge. “If you follow their arguments, it means that they have lied for years about the fact that it was only written by Anne Frank.”

Actually, as I pointed out in Section 110 of The Six Million: Fact or Fiction, Otto Frank actually admitted in an Amsterdam court that much of the handwriting was in fact his, and not that of Anne’s.

He explained that he had “transcribed” Anne’s diary before publication, and this was why the handwriting was his. Furthermore, Otto Frank announced, he had actually only published a “novel” called The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944 (in Dutch, Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 juni 1942 – 1 augustus 1944) and had never called it the Diary of Anne Frank. The title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl had been given to the book’s first English translation.

This “transcription” by Otto Frank finally explained the 1980 report by the German Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Investigation Bureau, or BKA) which showed that portions of the dairy had been altered or added after 1951. The manuscript was examined on orders of a West German court as the result of a libel action brought by Otto Frank against a German publisher who had claimed the book was a fraud.

The manuscript, in the form of three hardbound notebooks and 324 loose pages bound in a fourth notebook, was examined with special equipment. The results of tests performed at the BKA laboratories show that portions of the work, especially of the fourth volume, were written with a ballpoint pen. As ballpoint pens were not commercially available until after the war, the BKA concluded that those sections were added after Anne Frank died.

The real story of Anne Frank is tragic enough, but the cruel exploitation, exaggeration, and faking of her diary by the Holocaust storytellers is a scandal of epic proportions.