The Diary Was Written by Her Father

This is a variant of the forgery claim, dealt with in detail on the parallel “the diary is a forgery” leaf above this one. The specific allegation that Otto Frank wrote the diary fails on the same forensic ground as the general forgery claim, and on additional grounds specific to the authorship question. Otto Frank’s handwriting and prose style are documented in many surviving letters, business documents, and post-war communications. They are entirely different from Anne’s handwriting and prose style. The two cannot be confused on visual or textual analysis. The forensic examination of 1986 specifically addressed the authorship question and identified Anne’s handwriting throughout the diary materials, distinct from Otto’s typewriter-transcript that he made post-war and which was preserved separately.

The handwriting comparison

The Netherlands State Forensic Science Laboratory examination of 1980 to 1986 included direct comparison of the diary handwriting with three control sets. The first was Anne’s surviving school papers, letters and exercise books from before her time in hiding (1940 to 1942), held at the NIOD archive. The second was Otto Frank’s handwriting samples from his pre-war business correspondence (Otto had run the Opekta company in Amsterdam, then Pectacon, with substantial filing cabinets of letters), from his post-war correspondence with his second wife Fritzi Markovits and others, and from his marginal annotations on copies of the published diary. The third was the handwriting of Margot Frank, Anne’s sister, who had also kept her own diary in hiding (which has not survived) and whose handwriting is documented from her school papers.

The forensic comparison found that the diary handwriting was distinctively Anne’s: a teenage hand that progressed from the slightly rounded thirteen-year-old script of June 1942 to the more confident fifteen-year-old script of summer 1944, with the developmental progression observable across the materials. The handwriting was not Otto’s; Otto’s hand was an adult businessman’s mature script with a characteristic forward slant and pressure pattern, completely distinct from Anne’s lighter, more variable script. The handwriting was not Margot’s; Margot’s hand had its own characteristics distinct from both. The forensic examination produced a detailed comparative report with sample images, runs to several hundred pages, and is included as the appendix to the 1986 NIOD critical edition.

The textual evidence

The textual evidence parallels the handwriting evidence. The published diary contains internal references to events, conversations, and concerns that were specific to Anne’s experience in hiding and that Otto could not have invented post-war. The diary records arguments between Anne and her mother, Anne’s complicated relationship with Margot, Anne’s unfolding teenage romance with Peter van Pels, Anne’s observations of the other inhabitants of the annexe (Hermann van Pels, Auguste van Pels, Peter van Pels, Fritz Pfeffer), Anne’s reactions to BBC and Dutch government broadcasts, and Anne’s growing literary ambition. The events and the people are documented in independent sources: the testimony of the helpers (Miep Gies, Bep Voskuijl, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler), the German police records of the arrest, and the surviving correspondence of the families involved before they went into hiding. The internal coherence of the diary’s account with the external record is extensive.

The third manuscript set, the loose sheets on which Anne rewrote her own diary between May and August 1944, is the strongest textual evidence of authorship. The loose sheets contain Anne’s revisions of her own earlier entries, including changes of phrasing, additions of context, and self-editorial commentary. The pattern of revision is the pattern of an author working on her own material, not of a forger constructing a finished document. The 1986 critical edition reproduces the loose sheets in parallel with the original two diary sets, showing the relationship between the two stages of Anne’s own composition. No external party could have produced this kind of self-revision after the fact.

Otto’s editorial role

Otto Frank’s actual editorial role is well documented. After the war, on receiving the diary materials from Miep Gies, Otto first read them in private over several months. He then prepared a typed transcript, partly from the original diary entries and partly from Anne’s own loose-sheet revisions. He cut some passages he considered too personal (Anne’s reflections on her mother, some of her sexual reflections appropriate to a teenage girl, some of her sharper observations about other people in the annexe). He arranged for publication, first in Dutch in 1947 (Het Achterhuis), then in translations from 1950 onwards. The published 1947 version is a curated selection of the manuscript materials, prepared by a grieving father trying to honour his daughter’s memory while protecting the privacy of others. The full critical edition of 1986, with all three manuscript sets reproduced, allows the reader to see exactly what Otto cut and what he kept. The cuts were not invented material; they were genuine material that Otto chose not to publish.

The Otto Frank correspondence with the publishers, with translators, and with critics across the post-war decades is preserved at the NIOD archive. The correspondence shows Otto’s anxious attention to fidelity to Anne’s actual writing, his worry about misrepresenting her, and his eventual decision to deposit the original manuscripts with the Dutch state to ensure their preservation and accessibility. None of this is the behaviour of a forger; it is the behaviour of a man who was responsible for someone else’s work and was anxious to do right by it.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it inverts the actual relationship between Anne’s authorship and Otto’s editorship. Anne wrote the diary, in three sets of materials, between June 1942 and August 1944, in her own progressively maturing handwriting. Otto edited a selected version for publication after the war, while preserving the full original materials. The forensic record, the textual record, the helper testimony, and the corresponding documentary record all support this account. The denier claim that Otto wrote the diary requires the listener to dismiss the handwriting evidence, the textual evidence, the manuscript revision pattern, and the entirely separate documentary trail of Otto’s post-war editing. The claim has been examined in detail by every relevant authority that has looked at it, and has been rejected by all of them.

What did the forensic handwriting comparison find? Where can the original three manuscript sets be inspected? What did Otto Frank actually do with the materials after the war?

See also

• Anne Frank
• The Netherlands
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• The Reader
• Anne Frank House Amsterdam

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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
• Netherlands State Forensic Science Laboratory (Gerechtelijk Laboratorium), forensic examination report on the Anne Frank diary handwriting, 1980 to 1986, included as appendix to the 1986 critical edition
• NIOD (Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie), Anne Frank archive, with Otto Frank’s typed transcript, his correspondence, and the original manuscript materials
• Anne Frank House Amsterdam, “How Genuine Is the Diary of Anne Frank?”, https://www.annefrank.org
• Carol Ann Lee, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, Viking, 2002
• Carol Ann Lee, Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank, Penguin, 1999
• 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
• Bep Voskuijl, written and recorded recollections, in Jeroen De Bruyn and Joop van Wijk, Anne Frank: The Untold Story, Bep Voskuijl Productions, 2018
• Hamburg Civil Court, judgment in Otto Frank v. Heinz Roth, 1980
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Anne Frank: Diary Authentication”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org