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From: Sara 
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Subject: Re: David Irving's Deceit & Anne Frank's Diary-Fraud
Date: 26 Jul 2001 02:54:26 GMT
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[claims that the Diary of Anne Frank is a fake]

Denial: Robert Faurisson, formerly of the Department of Literature at 
the University of Lyons, demonstrates in his 1980 French book Le journal 
d'Anne Frank: est-il authentique? (The Diary of Anne Frank-Is It 
Authentic?) that it must have been impossible to hide in the Secret 
Annex and that, consequently, Anne's diary is a hoax. He points out that 
the noise in the attic (Anne's entries of August 5, 1943 and December 6, 
1943) would have alerted anybody working in the warehouse below the 
attic and given the fugitives away. 

Rebuttal: What Holocaust denier Faurisson omits are the preceding 
sentences of the two 1943 entries: namely, that Anne in the August entry 
first reveals: "The warehousemen have gone by now." And that she 
explains in the December 6 entry that the people in the attic were 
laughing hard on a Sunday evening when nobody else was in the building.

Denial: The diary of Anne Frank wasn't written by a young girl at all-it 
was written after the war by the Jewish author Meyer Levin and Anne's 
father.

Rebuttal: The principal sources for this claim are David Irving of Great 
Britain, perhaps the most famous Holocaust denier of the 
English-speaking world, and an odd little law suit.

Meyer Levin, author of such best-selling novels as Compulsion and The 
Settlers, praised Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in the New York 
Times in 1952, then tried to interest producers in his own adaptations 
of the diary for stage and film.

He failed, and the diary was finally adapted for the stage by Albert 
Hackett and Frances Goodrich with the title The Diary of Anne Frank. It 
enjoyed a long Broadway run, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 
for the best play of the year, and was later adapted as a successful 
film.

Levin, meanwhile, sued playwrights Hackett and Goodrich as well as 
Broadway producer Kermit Bloomgarden for breach of contract and 
plagiarism; they brought Otto Frank into the case, and he eventually 
settled out of court, paying Levin $15,000 in return for dropping all 
further claims. Levin's own theatrical version of the diary was staged 
in Tel Aviv in 1966.

David Irving probably prefers the Meyer Levin version. Author of a 1977 
history, Hitler¹s War (Viking Press), in which he acknowledged the 
murder of millions of Jews during World War II, Irving insisted even 
then that Hitler was unaware of the genocidal facts until it was too 
late. In the 1980s, however, Irving extended his position, arguing that 
most of the Holocaust history is pure fiction; more recently he has gone 
on the international lecture circuit publicizing his right-wing views. 
As early as 1975, he proclaimed in the Introduction to his German book 
Hitler und Seine Feldherren (Hitler and His Generals) (Ullstein Verlag; 
Berlin; 1975) that Otto Frank and Meyer Levin concocted Anne Frank's 
diary ‹ omitting the fact that the diary was published in Dutch in 1947, 
well before Levin even knew of the Franks' existence.

Similar accusations about Levin were made by Teressa Hendry in the 
American Mercury in the summer of 1967, although attacks on the 
authenticity of the diary can be traced back to November 1957 in 
Sweden's newspaper Fria Ord and a year later to papers in Denmark, 
Norway and Germany-also to such German Nazi sympathizers as E. Schonborn 
(chairman of the far-right Combat Association of German Soldiers), 
Werner Kuhnt, the editor-in-chief of the extreme-right-wing monthly 
Deutsche Stimme, and many others. Naturally, the self-admitted Nazi 
apologist Ditlieb Felderer calls Anne Frank a proven drug addict in his 
Anne Frank Diary-A Hoax? (Institute for Historical Review), because on 
September 16, 1943 she mentioned in her diary that she was taking 
valerian pills to fight her anxiety and depression.

Denial: Can anybody believe that a thirteen-year-old girl would write a 
diary that explains, in its third entry, why she's writing the diary in 
the first place-or believe that she would then include a history of her 
family? It just isn't plausible.

Rebuttal: So argues Arthur R. Butz in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: 
The Case against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry (Institute 
for Historical Review, Newport Beach, California; 1977).

No young girl, Butz claims, would write early in her diary why she felt 
compelled to jot down her thoughts. Nor would she go on to describe her 
family history, even if she were a Jewish girl in German-occupied 
Amsterdam whose family had been forced out of Germany by anti-Semitic 
measures in the 1930s.

Thus Butz condemns the diary for its "historical spirit," though a 
"historical spirit" is so obvious an approach to any war-time diary that 
we might begin to wonder if it's the history, not the "spirit," that 
Butz finds disagreeable.

And indeed, Butz goes on to improve on history, acknowledging, for 
example, that Anne (called Anneliese in Germany until her emigration to 
The Netherlands in 1933 at the age of four) Frank and her sister, 
Margot, died at Bergen-Belsen, but correcting the eyewitnesses who 
reported they died of typhus in the epidemic that swept the camp in 
early 1945. According to Butz, "Jewish families were isolated from the 
typhus epidemic." He fails to explain why, and how this medical miracle 
came to pass in a confined space packed with prisoners and deprived of 
all access to medicine. Yet at the same time the SS depots were bursting 
with medical and food supplies when Allied forces liberated the camp, 
according to the outstanding two-hour American 1995 documentary Anne 
Frank Remembered, written, produced and directed by Jon Blair. Nor does 
Butz explain what Anne Frank, not yet sixteen, died of at Bergen-Belsen 
in early March of 1945.

In fact, Anne Frank, who survived seven weeks in Auschwitz before being 
sent on one of those well-known "death marches" with thousands of other 
prisoners to Bergen-Belsen on October 28, 1944, was among the 82 percent 
of Jews living in Holland (140,000 in 1940) who perished in Nazi 
concentration camps. The last "death march" from Auschwitz to 
Bergen-Belsen in January 1945 consisted of 60,000 prisoners. Half of 
them perished on the icy roads. Of the 2 1,000 Dutch Jews who went into 
hiding during the war about 9,000 were betrayed to the Germans and 
virtually all of them were exterminated.

Denial: The diary of Anne Frank is widely regarded as a fake in Japan.

Rebuttal: On the contrary, the diary has sold in excess of four million 
copies in Japanese.

And in a postwar Japan still suffering the psychic aftershocks of the 
atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Anne Frank herself has 
taken on a special meaning, her life celebrated each year with a 
national essay contest.

Denial: The Dutch version of Anne Frank's diary mentions nothing of the 
sexual awakening, included in the 1952 American version, proof enough 
that the diary is a hoax.

Rebuttal: Correct. The first Dutch and American editions are different.

Editors of the Dutch edition deleted details concerning the sexual 
stirrings of its young author, some of which were re-instated in the 
American edition, published by Doubleday in 1952 as Anne Frank: The 
Diary of a Young Girl. Those passages were eventually included in later 
Dutch editions and dozens of translations, and all additional passages 
from the original were included in the definitive edition published by 
Doubleday in 1995. Doubleday's 1988 translation from the Dutch of "The 
Critical Edition " gives a brilliant analysis of everything and 
everybody connected with the diary. It provides compelling proof of this 
poignant testament. In 1995, a New York Times critic called if "the 
single most compelling personal account of the Holocaust."

As to the sexual passages, however modest by today's standards, such as 
Anne's menstruation, they have been the subject of still other attacks. 
In a tract published in Sweden in 1978, for example, Anne Frank's Diary: 
A Hoax?, Nazi-sympathizer Ditlieb Felderer describes fourteen-year-old 
Anne Frank as a "sex maniac" and her diary the work of a "child 
pornographer," although he characterizes it later as "a forgery." 
Meanwhile Arthur R. Butz dismissed it as a hoax in his The Hoax of the 
Twentieth Century  after he had "looked it over."

Anne also wrote two volumes of stories, which Doubleday published in 
1983 as Tales from the Secret Annex.

Denial: Hasn't the respected German weekly Der Spiegel cast doubt on the 
authenticity of Anne Frank's entire work?

Rebuttal: No. The October 6, 1980 issue of Der Spiegel only raises 
questions about the number of corrections Anne's father made in the 
handwritten texts of the diaries.

Otto Frank used a ballpoint pen to correct the diaries and then, 
assisted by friends, typed and edited the text, leading Der Spiegel to 
state that the diary had been subjected to "countless manipulations."

Der Spiegel was careful to point out that ballpoints were not marketed 
prior to 1945; nor did it lend any support whatsoever to the claim that 
the diary is a forgery. On the contrary, the magazine dismissed all such 
charges as Nazi-oriented, postwar fabrication. (See Der Spiegel; April 
1, 1959.)

As to the authenticity of the diaries, in 1980, following the death of 
Otto Frank in Birsfelden, Switzerland, forensic and graphology experts 
of Holland's State Forensic Science Laboratory, examined the diaries for 
the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, concerning itself 
with handwriting identification and document examination. Bindery glue 
and fibers were conclusively dated to the early 1940s or slightly 
earlier, ink and paper to the same period. Graphology experts ruled out 
Otto Frank as a potential forger: both the printing and cursive 
handwriting his daughter used resembled her pre-war postcards and 
letters to friends, material Otto Frank had no access to until well 
after the diary was published. Indeed, forgery itself was virtually 
ruled out: variations in the handwriting over the course of 26 months of 
diary entries, typical of a teenager's experiments with style, were 
judged unlikely to be the work of any forger.

The conclusions are available in the Institute's 714-page volume 
detailing the authentication procedures; documents regarding the tests 
are available at the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, 
The Hague, in a report of more than 250 pages.

Denial: In 1991, the Institute for Historical Review made an offer of 
$25,000 for proof that the diary of Anne Frank was legitimate. The 
Institute never paid a dime of that $25,000, evidence that the diary is 
a hoax.

Rebuttal: The institute is a California-based operation that frequently 
denies the Holocaust, and true: it didn't pay a dime-not initially.

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal suggested that the Institute agree to a 
review of the evidence by a former California Supreme Court justice his 
suggestion was rejected; Wiesenthal withdrew his claim; and another 
Holocaust survivor, Mel Mermelstein, went on the offensive. Mermelstein 
provided the Institute with documentary evidence of the Holocaust in the 
form of proof that the Nazis had exterminated his family at Auschwitz in 
1944. When the Institute refused to pay, Mermelstein sued and the Court 
decided to award him a total sum, not of $25,000 but $90,000.

Denial: Otto Frank had plenty of time to forge a diary and make a fast 
buck after the war.

Rebuttal: Anne's father had neither the time nor the talent to create a 
teenager's diary, and no idea initially that his daughter's private 
thoughts might be publishable. The facts are these:

Anne's last entry was made on Tuesday, August 1, 1944; three days later, 
the occupants of the Secret Annex were arrested by Austrian SS officer 
Karl Josef Silberbauer and four Dutch Nazis. Oberscharfuehrer 
Silberbauer, on that occasion in a green uniform, was searching for 
money and jewelry and emptied a briefcase onto the floor. Among its 
contents were Anne's diaries, both the hardbound volumes and the loose 
pages; also some money and jewelry ‹ valuables that he kept.

The couple who had looked after the occupants of the Secret Annex for 
two years, Miep Gies and her husband Jan, (Van Santen in the diary), 
subsequently returned to the empty rooms, gathered up Anne's papers, and 
hid them in a desk drawer. This true-life heroine, Miep Gies, gives a 
modest recounting of her daredevil acts in the inspiring Oscar-winning 
documentary Anne Frank Remembered, made in 1995.

In August of 1945, Otto Frank placed an ad in a Dutch newspaper seeking 
information about his daughters, Margot and Anne. It was only when he 
learned that they had died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen shortly before its 
liberation that Miep Gies handed Anne's diaries to her father.

A few months later, on April 3, 1946, Jan Romein's glowing appraisal of 
Otto Frank's excerpts from the diaries, typewritten for his surviving 
family and friends only, appeared in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool. It 
had been checked for grammatical errors by Mr. Frank's old friend, the 
Dutch dramatist Albert Cauvern. At that time Mr. Frank did not even 
think of having the diary published as a book. Only a year later, in 
June of 1947, an Amsterdam publishing firm, Contact, issued the diary in 
book form, calling it Het Achterhuis. Several other houses had rejected 
the manuscript and the book wasn't expected to be much of a seller: 
available today in more than 55 languages, with 25-30 million copies in 
print, the diary had a small first printing of some 1,500 copies.

Denial: Now that it has been established that there are two different 
versions of Anne Frank's diary, isn't it reasonable to assume that 
they're both forgeries?

Rebuttal: There are two versions: Anne's initial and frequently 
self-edited diary, and a second, more carefully written version entered 
in a second diary.

Anne made her first diary entry on June 12, 1942, when she was 13 years 
old; shortly after, on July 5 ‹ see her diary entry of Thursday July 9, 
1942 ‹ she went into hiding with her family, to be joined by the Van 
Daan (real name: Van Pels) family, and Dr. Albert Dussel (real name: 
Friedrich Pfeffer) in the now world-famous attic ‹ the "Secret Annex" at 
263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. In the spring of 1944, a Thursday, March 
28, in a broadcast address on Radio Oranje (England), the Dutch Minister 
of Education in exile, Gerrit Bolkestein, (spelled Bolkesteyn by Anne), 
asked his listeners to prepare war diaries for possible publication 
(Anne's entry of March 29). Hundreds of Dutch citizens would do exactly 
that, and several weeks later, Anne Frank began editing hers, rewriting 
old entries on loose sheets of paper as she continued to make new 
entries in her original hard-bound volume and start on another exercise 
book on April 17, 1944.

Following his return from Auschwitz in 1945, Anne's father, Otto Frank, 
drew from both sets of diaries, typed a version for personal friends, 
and then, at the suggestion of a college professor, edited the diary for 
publication.    

As to the two original documents, both are at the "Secret Annex" at 263 
Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, which serves today as the Anne Frank museum; 
some 200 other Dutch war diaries are in the Netherlands State Institute 
for War Documentation, The Hague.

Kuttner, Paul.

The Holocaust: hoax or history? : the book of answers to those who would 
deny the Holocaust 
Published by Dawnwood Press
Dawnwood Press ISBN 0-911025-15-4

-- 
"It's always nice to see a prejudice overruled by a deeper prejudice."     
John Sayles, _Lone Star_

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