The Anne Frank Diary is a Forgery

The Anne Frank diary is among the most thoroughly forensically authenticated documents of the twentieth century. It has been the subject of repeated examinations by independent forensic institutes, by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), by handwriting analysts, paper analysts and ink chemists. Each examination has confirmed that the diary was written by Anne Frank in the period 1942 to 1944, on the materials available in Amsterdam during that period, in her own progressively maturing teenage handwriting. The denier claim that the diary is a forgery has been examined and dismissed by every professional body that has looked at it. The continued circulation of the claim is a function of the diary’s symbolic importance to the deniers, not of any evidence for the claim.

What the diary actually consists of

The Anne Frank materials at the NIOD in Amsterdam consist of three sets of original documents in Anne’s handwriting. The first is a diary in a red-and-cream-checked autograph book, given to her on her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, in which she made daily entries from 12 June 1942 until 5 December 1942. The second is a set of two school exercise books, into which she continued the diary from 22 December 1943 to 17 April 1944 and from 17 April 1944 to 1 August 1944 (with the gap between December 1942 and December 1943 covered by loose sheets that have not survived). The third is a set of approximately 215 loose sheets, on which she rewrote and revised her earlier entries between May 1944 and August 1944, after hearing a Dutch government broadcast from London (the Bolkestein speech of 28 March 1944) calling for the preservation of wartime diaries for post-war publication. The third set is therefore a self-edited revision of the first two, prepared by Anne herself with publication in mind.

Otto Frank, returning to Amsterdam in June 1945 after his liberation from Auschwitz and learning of his daughters’ deaths at Bergen-Belsen, was given the diary materials by Miep Gies, who had retrieved them from the floor of the secret annexe after the family’s arrest on 4 August 1944. Otto edited the materials for publication, cutting some passages he considered too personal or hurtful to surviving acquaintances; the first published edition (Amsterdam, 1947) is the edited version of the third set, supplemented by some entries from the first two. The full critical edition, published by NIOD in 1986, contains all three sets in parallel columns alongside the published version, allowing the reader to see exactly what Otto did and did not include.

The 1986 forensic examination

The Netherlands State Forensic Science Laboratory (Gerechtelijk Laboratorium) conducted a comprehensive forensic examination of all three sets of materials between 1980 and 1986, at the request of the NIOD, and following denier claims (notably by Robert Faurisson and others) that the diary contained ballpoint-pen entries that could not have been made before the ballpoint pen was widely available. The examination found that the diary was written almost entirely in fountain pen and pencil, both of which were ordinary writing instruments in 1942 to 1944 Amsterdam. Two scraps of paper at the end of one volume, comprising a few words, were written in ballpoint pen and could not have been written by Anne in the 1942 to 1944 period; these were determined to be later annotations by an unknown hand, possibly by an editor preparing the publication, and contain no substantive content (they were brief notes about the page they were attached to). The body of the diary, in fountain pen and pencil, was determined to be written by Anne Frank in the 1942 to 1944 period.

The forensic examination tested the paper (consistent with wartime Dutch paper stocks of 1942 to 1944), the ink (consistent with fountain-pen inks available in occupied Amsterdam), the handwriting (compared to known samples of Anne’s handwriting from school papers and letters that survive from before her time in hiding), and the typewriter (used for the post-1945 transcription that Otto Frank made; identified as Otto Frank’s own machine). The findings were published as De Dagboeken van Anne Frank (NIOD, 1986; English edition The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, Doubleday, 1989). The report runs to over 700 pages. It is the standing forensic answer to the forgery question.

The Hamburg court ruling of 1980

The forgery question was also tested in a German court. In 1976 Otto Frank brought a libel action against Heinz Roth, a German neo-Nazi publisher who had published material asserting the diary to be forged. The Hamburg court ruled against Roth in 1980, finding the diary’s authenticity established. The ruling was based on testimony from forensic experts, on Otto Frank’s own evidence, and on the documentary record of the diary’s discovery and editing. Roth was fined and ordered to cease the publication of the forgery claims. The case is reported in the German legal series.

The Frankfurt Hamburg court rulings against subsequent denier publishers (the Edgar Geiss case of 1976; the Werner Kuhnt case of 1979; and others) all followed the 1980 precedent. The diary’s authenticity has been the legally established position in German jurisdiction since 1980.

The corroborating evidence

The diary is also corroborated by everything around it. The arrest record of the Frank family at Prinsengracht 263 on 4 August 1944, in the German police records of the Sicherheitsdienst Amsterdam, exists and was used at the post-war Dutch trials. The deportation records from Westerbork to Auschwitz on 3 September 1944 show the Frank family on the transport. The Auschwitz registration records of the women’s selection survive in part. The Bergen-Belsen records of February to March 1945 show Anne and Margot Frank as having died at the camp during the typhus epidemic. The eight people in hiding in the secret annexe, all of whom but Otto Frank were killed, are independently documented at every stage of the process by Dutch, German and camp records. The diary’s narrative of the events leading up to the arrest is corroborated by the records of the events that followed.

The four people who helped the Franks while they were in hiding (Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler) gave their own post-war accounts of the period, all consistent with the diary’s account of life in the annexe. Their accounts are independent of the diary; they were people who had no reason to invent the story they told.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that the Anne Frank diary is a forgery is harmful because it targets the most accessible Holocaust testimony, the one that has done more than any other to introduce the Holocaust to children and to general readers across the world. The diary’s authenticity has been forensically established beyond any reasonable doubt, judicially established in repeated court proceedings, and corroborated by the surrounding documentary record. The denial requires the listener to dismiss the forensic chemistry, the handwriting analysis, the paper and ink studies, the court rulings, the Frank family records, the Westerbork transport list, the Auschwitz registration, the Bergen-Belsen death records, and the testimony of the people who hid the family. The denial is not an evidential argument; it is the wholesale rejection of evidence in favour of a conclusion the deniers want.

What did the 1986 forensic examination find? Where can the report be read? What did the German courts rule, and on what evidence?

See also

• Anne Frank
• The Netherlands
• Robert Faurisson
• The Reader

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Sources

• De Dagboeken van Anne Frank, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, Bert Bakker / Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, 1986; English edition The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, Doubleday, 1989, with the full forensic appendix
• Netherlands State Forensic Science Laboratory (Gerechtelijk Laboratorium), forensic examination report on the Anne Frank diary, 1980 to 1986, included as appendix to the 1986 critical edition
• Hamburg Civil Court, judgment in Otto Frank v. Heinz Roth, 1980, in the German civil law reports
• NIOD (Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie), Anne Frank archive, with the original manuscripts on permanent loan to the Anne Frank House Amsterdam
• Anne Frank House Amsterdam, “How Genuine Is the Diary of Anne Frank?”, https://www.annefrank.org
• Carol Ann Lee, Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank, Penguin, 1999
• Carol Ann Lee, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, Viking, 2002
• Melissa Müller, Anne Frank: The Biography, Henry Holt, 1998
• Miep Gies and Alison Leslie Gold, Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family, Simon and Schuster, 1987
• Anne Frank Stichting, Anne Frank: Her Life in Words and Pictures from the Archives of the Anne Frank House, Roaring Brook Press, 2009
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Anne Frank” and “Diary of Anne Frank: Authenticity”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org