From time to time you can read that the world-famous records kept by a Jewish girl during the Holocaust were created by someone else after the war. We checked whether these suspicions were justified.

Anneliese Marie Frank lived on earth for only 15 full years, but the teenage thoughts that she is believed to have transferred to paper became a document of the era, the interest in which continues to this day. In February 1945, Anna died of typhus in a concentration camp, and two years later her father Otto decided to publish his daughter’s diary entitled “Refuge.” Since then, the book has been translated into 70 languages, many films have been made, and the Dutch house where she was hiding has become Anne Frank Museum.

However, over time, rumors began to arise that the girl’s diary was nothing more than a skillful fake. One of the first such doubts was voiced back in 1959, when a high school teacher from Lübeck expressed his opinion Lothar Stielau, supported by local neo-Nazi leader Heinried Budeberg. In the 1980s, similar conclusions of the famous French literary critic and historical revisionist Robert Faurisson, which resulted in a book, caused great resonance. “Is Anne Frank's Diary Authentic?”. And these days, many works are being created that question the authenticity of a literary monument, for example, the work of Alexei Tokar "The Diary of Anne Frank: A Mixture of Fabrications and Descriptions of Genitals".

First you need to understand what the original diary of Anne Frank is. Initially, the girl lived with her parents and sister in Germany, but in 1933–1934, after Hitler came to power, the family moved to Amsterdam. In 1940, Germany occupied the Netherlands, after which hard times came for Jewish families here too. Otto, Anna's father, tried to apply for a visa to the United States or Cuba, but the only approved application in December 1941 was canceled due to the Americans' entry into World War II. The further, the clearer the threat looming over the family became, and on July 16, 1942, the parents planned to move to a shelter located in the second part of the building where Otto Frank worked. Access to this outbuilding was only through one passage, disguised as a filing cabinet:

However, due to a sudden summons ordering family members to appear to be sent to a concentration camp, the escape to the shelter took place earlier - on July 6, 1942. Three weeks earlier, Anna turned 13 years old. Among other things, she was given a notebook with a red, white and green cover - what is believed to be her first diary. It ends on December 5, 1942. The second surviving diary, a school notebook, covers events from December 22, 1943 to April 17, 1944. Finally, the third and last part of the notes is devoted to the period from April 17 to August 1, 1944. Three days after the date of the last entry, representatives of the Gestapo and Dutch police burst into the shelter and arrested all the people hiding there who were awaiting a concentration camp.

In addition to the diary itself, Anna also left behind “Stories from the Secret Annex” (in the ledger) and “Notebook with Favorite Quotes” (in the checkbook). In addition, the girl rewrote and rearranged many of her diary entries on separate sheets of paper, hoping to publish them as a separate book in the future. This updated version mainly covers events from December 1942 to December 1943. When Otto returned to Amsterdam after the war and learned through the Red Cross about the death of his daughters, former colleague Miep Giese gave him Anna’s notes, which she said were collected at the time in the family shelter.

Having familiarized himself with the diary, Otto began to translate individual fragments into German and send them to his mother in Switzerland. When he was offered to publish a diary, he initially refused, because, firstly, he did not want to disclose some intimate things that he found in the diary, and secondly, he was afraid of unwittingly tarnishing the memory of other inhabitants of the “Vault”. Then, having agreed to publication, Otto Frank compiled a third, shortened version of the diary, removing, in his opinion, all that was superfluous. Thus, today there are as many as three versions of Anne Frank's diary: the original, revised by Anne and revised by her father. All three versions came out under one cover only in the 1980s, a few years after the death of Otto Frank.

So, what are the main theses of those who deny the authenticity of the diary? As he writes Alexey Tokar, “in 1956–1958, a lawsuit brought about a lot of noise in Europe by the real author of the diary, the famous writer and journalist Meyer Levin, against Anna’s father Otto Frank for royalties (profits from the sale of the book). As a result, Levin was awarded $50,000 in damages "for fraud, failure to fulfill monetary obligations and illegal use of an idea." The subject of the claim in this process were the most dramatized versions of the “diary”, made, in particular, for film, radio, television and theatrical productions. Levin insisted on recognition of his copyrights, and his claim was upheld by the New York City Court. The court found that Otto Frank promised to pay Meyer Lewin at least $50,000 to use dialogue written by Lewin and include it in the diary as the intellectual work of his daughter. Then the judge, by his order, closed the data on the case for a hundred years, that is, he classified the materials of the trial, from which one can find out which fragments of the “Diary” were written by Meyer Levin. Even the court decision, which confirmed the incomplete authenticity of The Diary of Anne Frank, did not receive wide publicity in the press.”

In fact, the American writer and journalist Meyer Levin after the war met with a French translation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and, admiring it, decided to stage a play and a film based on the girl’s notes. He secured Otto Frank's permission to negotiate with potential producers and also showed him the preliminary script. Frank approved the text, but left the right of evaluation to theater professionals. However, with the latter, Levin had problems problems, and he was surpassed by other Americans - Albert Hackett and Francis Goodrich, whose Broadway staging on the same topic was not only a great success with audiences, but also received a Pulitzer Prize. That's when Levin filed a lawsuit regarding plagiarism, which even won, however, this case in no way concerned the original authorship of the diary; it was purely about the rights to processing. Therefore, the above argument of Alexey Tokar and his other like-minded people is completely false.

Further, Alexey Tokar writes: “The editors of the Federation newspaper reproduced the cover of Life International magazine for August 1958 with a sample of Anne Frank’s handwriting and her photograph; below she placed one page from the manuscript published under the title “The Diary of Anne Frank.” It was very noticeable that the handwritings were completely different.” And: “In 1976, Otto sued two Germans, Ernst Rohmer and Edgar Geis, who distributed pamphlets claiming that The Diary was a fraudulent literary work (the Jewish media immediately called them neo-Nazis, although when the Jew Meyer Lewin sued the Jew Otto Frank, the media preferred not to mention this case at all). As part of the trial, German official experts examined the handwriting and determined that the entire diary provided was written by one person. The person who wrote the diary used a ballpoint pen throughout. Unfortunately for Mr. Frank, ballpoint pens were not available until 1951, while Anna famously died of typhus in 1944. At the request of the German court, the German criminal police laboratory in Wiesbaden, Bundes Kriminal Amt (BKA), used special equipment to conduct a forensic examination of the manuscript, which at that time consisted of three hardcover notebooks and 324 separate pages bound in a fourth notebook. The results of research carried out in the WKA laboratory showed that a “significant” part of the work, especially the fourth volume, was written with a ballpoint pen. Since ballpoint pens were not available until 1951, the BKA concluded that these sections were most likely added later. Finally, the BKA has clearly determined that none of the handwriting in the diary matches any known examples of Anna's handwriting. The WCA information was then hidden at the urgent request of the Jewish community, but later it accidentally became available to researchers in the United States. Based on this report, the German magazine Der Spiegel published its own sensational investigation, which proved that some changes were made after 1951, not everything was written by the same hand, and other pages were also inserted into the diary and their numbering was changed - therefore, the entire diary is a post-war fake.”

Processes affecting handwriting in records in one way or another began back in 1959. Then Otto Frank sued the aforementioned teacher Lothar Stielau and neo-Nazi Heinried Budeberg. After a detailed investigation into the authenticity of Anne Frank's handwriting (resulting in a 131-page report), the Lübeck District Court decidedthat the diary was real. Moreover, during the preliminary investigation, Stielau and Budeberg apologized for their conclusions and retracted them, having become convinced of the authenticity of the diary.

It is also safe to say that there are no entries in the diary made with a ballpoint pen - only with different types of ink and colored pencil. The basis of the legend about the ballpoint pen really became report Federal Criminal Police Office in Wiesbaden, published in 1980. It said that “fountain pen corrections” had been made on some of the loose pages of the diary. The fact is that the experts were obliged to study all the papers submitted for analysis. The largest investigation into the authenticity of the girl's diary, which was carried out by the Dutch Institute of Forensic Sciences in the mid-1980s, showedthat the ballpoint pen entries were found on only two pages with annotations that had nothing to do with the actual contents of the diary. Apparently they were placed between other pages later. In 1987, a certain Ockelmann from Hamburg stated that these annotations were made by his mother, a member of the commission that conducted a graphological examination of Anna’s handwriting in 1959–1960. Thus, the handwriting of the "real diarist of Anne Frank" actually belongs to a handwriting expert. As for the 65-page report of the Institute of Forensic Sciences, it formed the basis of an investigation by the National Institute of War Documentation of the Netherlands, the conclusion of which was unequivocal: “Both versions of Anne Frank’s diary were written by her between 1942 and 1944. The claims that the diary was written by someone else are thus completely refuted.” To top it all off, in 2006, the German Federal Criminal Police Office even distributed statement, which emphasized that the 1980 investigation in no way cast doubt on the diary's authorship.

In 1998 surfaced five previously unknown pages from Anne Frank's diary. The same Institute of Forensic Science studied them and came to the conclusion that the handwriting on them coincides with other known examples of Anne Frank’s handwriting “with a probability bordering on certainty.” In all likelihood, Otto Frank did not want to make these diary fragments public because of Anne's rather offensive remarks about his first wife, who died in Auschwitz, and about their marriage.

Let us add that all the high-profile trials concerning the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary were won by defenders of the authenticity of the records, and they began even before the publication of the results of the Dutch investigation. These days, such trials have become very rare, apparently due to the convincing arguments of Dutch experts. Moreover, on December 9, 1998, the Amsterdam District Court not only banned pamphlet by the aforementioned French revisionist Robert Faurisson and his colleague Siegfried Verbeke, “The Diary of Anne Frank: A Critical Approach,” but also imposed a fine of 25,000 guilders on any further denial of the authenticity of the diary, as well as unwanted distribution of publications on this subject. Nevertheless, deniers of the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary, a considerable proportion of whom are Holocaust deniers and fighters against the “conspiracy of world Zionism,” still exist today.