Who wrote Anne Frank's diary?
Mark Honeychurch (November 7, 2022)
It seems like the answer should be pretty simple - Anne Frank, of course. But sadly not everyone seems to accept this. After a brief hiatus, I've returned to watching the god-awful series Europa, a pro-nazi “documentary” series about World War 2. Last time I wrote about a claim that the voice actor for Winnie the Pooh had secretly recorded most of Churchill's wartime speeches because he was too drunk to do it himself. This time the claim is that Anne Frank couldn't have written the diaries attributed to her because, among other things, much of it is written in ballpoint pen, and that type of pen wasn't invented until the 1950s. I've transcribed what the documentary had to say:
_“Anne Frank died of typhus in March 1945. However, the original diary manuscript was forensically examined by the German State Forensic Bureau (the Bundes Kriminal Amt). Their analysis determined that significant portions of the work were written with a ballpoint pen. Since ballpoint pens were not available to everyone before 1951, portions of the work were added well after the war.
Handwriting experts determined, after closer examination of the originals, that all of the writing in the diary was by the same hand, and the BKA determined that none of the diary handwriting matched known examples of Anne's real handwriting.
The true author of the diary was jewish novelist Meyer Levin, who demanded and was awarded $50,000 in payments for his work in a court action against Anne's father, Otto Frank.”_
Phew, there's a lot to work through here! We have three claims: that the diary was written in ballpoint pen, which wasn't available until after the second world war; that the handwriting in the diary doesn't match Anne Frank's handwriting; and that the diary was written by Meyer Levin, and not Anne Frank.
Firstly, let's look for the origin of these claims. It turns out that the text from the documentary appears to have been plagiarised from an anonymous image posted on the internet. The text in the image I found below is suspiciously similar to the script for the Europa show:
https://i.imgur.com/BsCv4b5.png
Using TinEye to try to find the origin of this image, the first appearance I could find was from 2016 on the Bad History subreddit, which predates the documentary by a year:
https://tineye.com/search/98f5e50d05b030606e4238db67526a1192d0fe17?sort=crawl_date&order=asc&page=26
It might be that the documentary author created this image himself, and released it before his documentary, but it seems more likely that someone else created the image, and that the documentary creator, Tobias Bratt, used this as source material for his documentary.
The root idea for each of these claims is much older than 2016.
The ballpoint claim appears to originate from a 1978 book by Ditlieb Felderer called “Anne Frank's Diary - A Hoax” - published by a well-known holocaust denial organisation from the US called the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). The claim was also mentioned in 1985 in Ernst Zundel's trial in Canada (read more here, on page 80).
The handwriting claims have been made by the IHR since 1985 (I won't link to an article on their website about this, for obvious reasons, but the Holocaust Denial on Trial website has a decent page about the history of this and other claims).
The Meyer Levin claims are even older, originating from Norway and Sweden back in the late 1950s.
So what about the substance of the claims themselves? Let's look at each of them in turn.
Firstly the ballpoint pen claim. This isn't a pure fabrication, just mostly nonsense - the Anne Frank website has a page tackling this myth. It says there were two loose leaf papers that were part of the diary collection. These pages were apparently written in ballpoint, but they weren't pages of the diary itself - just pages of annotations. After the diary was written (and re-written) by Anne Frank, pages of notes have been inserted, annotations and corrections have been added, etc. It turns out that a couple of these extra pieces of paper have some writing in ballpoint pen, but the diary itself is not written in ballpoint - it was written in fountain pen ink, and in coloured pencil.
The modern ballpoint pen was invented by Laszlo Biro in 1931. Biro didn't start manufacturing his pens until the early 1940s. So this part of the story at least is true - that Anne Frank couldn't have written any of her diary using a ballpoint pen. And the reason it took Biro a few years to manufacture his new invention? He had to move from Hungary to Argentina, to flee the Nazi regime. Yes, in a slight touch of irony, it turns out that the inventor of the modern ballpoint pen was Jewish.
As far as the handwriting claim is concerned, Anne not only wrote her diary over a period of years as a child, but also rewrote large parts of it later on as she considered that it might eventually be published. It would be expected for a child's handwriting to change as they mature. Given the rewrite, placing the various written and rewritten parts of the diary in chronological order will end up with a text where the handwriting jumps backwards and forwards in time between age 13 and 15 - so some irregularity is to be expected. However a 1980s forensic investigation concluded “the report of the Netherlands Forensic Institute has convincingly demonstrated that both versions of the diary of Anne Frank were written by her in the years 1942 to 1944. The allegations that the diary was the work of someone else are thus conclusively refuted.”
As to the claim of Meyer Levin being the original author, in reality Levin offered to help Otto Frank publish the diary in the US, as he saw it as an important voice from the war. Levin eventually wrote a play based on Anne Frank's diary, and it was this play, and the fact that his version was not used but possibly plagiarised for a later version of a play, from which the money dispute arose:
I'm sure it's come as no surprise to you, as a skeptic, that these claims are without merit. It could even be argued that it's not even worth looking into these kinds of holocaust denial claims, as they tend to be nonsense and a little disturbing. But I find that taking claims like these seriously, and spending the time looking into their origins and the truth, both helps me to hone my skeptical tools, and gives me ammunition that I might end up needing if I ever find myself having a beer with a holocaust denying neo-Nazi (which sounds improbable, but I've certainly found myself in weirder situations in the past!).