The Diary of a Young Girl

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank was published in Dutch in 1947 (and in English in 1952), using extracts from the diary she kept while in hiding during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands.

Neo-Nazi Attacks on the Diary

As the name of Anne Frank became widely known in the decade after the war, and reading of her diary shed light into the scale of Nazi atrocities, revisionists began to slander her and challenge the authenticity of her diary.

Related Topics:
Atrocities - Revisionists

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Simon Wiesenthal's encounter with revisionists distributing pamphlets calling the diary a 'fraud' propelled him into investigating the arrest of the Frank family, with the dual purpose of bringing to justice the betrayer and thus proving the diary's historic legitimacy. The investigation ended in 1963 when he located the arresting officer, Karl Silberbauer, who it transpired could shed little light on the identity of the betrayer. Holocaust deniers shifted their focus away from denying the existence of Anne Frank to casting doubt on the authenticity of the published diary.

Related Topics:
Simon Wiesenthal - Karl Silberbauer

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Otto Frank had mentioned in interviews that he had cut passages before publication that would be of little interest to the general reader and had assigned pseudonyms to protect the identities of those mentioned, which led deniers to allege that the published version was not an accurate transcription of the manuscripts, and had been written wholly or partly by Otto Frank or one of his associates. Although he took legal action for the remainder of his life to protect the memory of his daughter, it was only with the publication of Anne Frank's unabridged diaries that the debate could be put to rest.

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