These references to gas chambers and this plan of the camp constitute the kind of proof the deniers claim to be seeking. There is, of course, a myriad of additional documentation regarding deportations, murders, supplies of Zyklon-B, and other aspects of the Final Solution. I mention them not as proof of the Nazi annihilation of the Jews but as proof of the degree to which the deniers distort and deceive.
Anne Frank’s diary has become one of the deniers’ most popular targets. For more than thirty years they have tried to prove that it was written after the war. It would seem to be a dubious allocation of the deniers’ energies that they try to prove that a small book by a young girl full of musings about her life, relationship with her parents, emerging sexuality, and movie stars was not really written by her. But they have chosen their target purposefully.
Since its publication shortly after the war, the diary has sold more than twenty million copies in more than forty countries. For many readers it is their introduction to the Holocaust. Countless grade school and high school classes use it as a required text. The diary’s popularity and impact, particularly on the young, make discrediting it as important a goal for the deniers as their attack on the gas chambers. By instilling doubts in the minds of young people about this powerful book, they hope also to instill doubts about the Holocaust itself.
On what do these deniers and neo-Nazis build their case? A brief history of the publication of the diary, and of some of the subsequent events surrounding its production as a play and film, demonstrates how the deniers twist the truth to fit their ideological agenda.
Anne Frank began her diary on June 12, 1942. In the subsequent twenty-six months she filled a series of albums, loose sheets of paper, and exercise and account books. In addition she wrote a set of stories called Tales From the Secret Annex.[3] Anne, who frequently referred to her desire to be a writer, took her diary very seriously. Approximately five months before the family’s arrest, listening to a clandestine radio she heard the Dutch minister of education request in a broadcast from London that people save “ordinary documents—a diary, letters from a Dutch forced laborer in Germany, a collection of sermons given by a parson or a priest.” This would help future generations understand what the nation had endured during those terrible years. The next day Anne noted, “Of course they all made a rush at my diary immediately.”{30} Anxious to publish her recollections in book form after the war, she rewrote the first volumes of the diary on loose copy paper. In it she changed some of the names of the principal characters, including her own (Anne Frank became Anne Robin.{31})
When Otto Frank was liberated from Auschwitz and returned from the war, he learned that his daughters were dead. He prepared a typed edition of the diary for relatives and friends, making certain grammatical corrections, incorporating items from the different versions, and omitting details that might offend living people or that concerned private family matters, such as Anne’s stormy relationship with her mother. He gave his typed manuscript to a friend and asked him to edit it.{32} (Other people apparently also made editorial alterations to it.) The friend’s wife prepared a typed version of the edited manuscript. Frank approached a number of publishers with this version, which was repeatedly rejected.[4] When it was accepted the publishers suggested that references to sex, menstruation, and two girls touching each other’s breasts be deleted because they lacked the proper degree of “propriety” for a Dutch audience. When the diary was published in England, Germany, France, and the United States, additional changes were made. The deniers cite these different versions and different copies of the typescript to buttress their claim that it is all a fabrication and that there was no original diary. They also point to the fact that two different types of handwriting—printing and cursive writing—were used in the diary. They claim that the paper and the ink used were not produced until the 1950s and would have been unavailable to a girl hiding in an attic in Amsterdam in 1942.
But it is the Meyer Levin affair on which the deniers have most often relied to make their spurious charges. Levin, who had first read the diary while he was living in France, wrote a laudatory review of it when Doubleday published it. Levin’s review, which appeared in the New York Times Book Review, was followed by other articles by him on the diary in which he urged that it be made into a play and film.{33} In 1952 Otto Frank appointed Levin his literary agent in the United States to explore the possibility of producing a play. Levin wrote a script that was turned down by a series of producers. Frustrated by Levin’s failures and convinced that this script would not be accepted, Frank awarded the production rights to Kermit Bloomgarden, who turned, at the suggestion of American author Lillian Hellman, to two accomplished MGM screenwriters. Their version of the play was a success and won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize.
Levin, deeply embittered, sued, charging that the playwrights had plagiarized his material and ideas. In January 1958 a jury ruled that Levin should be awarded fifty thousand dollars in damages. However, the New York State Supreme Court set aside the jury’s verdict, explaining that since Levin and the MGM playwrights had both relied on the same original source—Anne’s diary—there were bound to be similarities between the two.{34}
Since it appeared that another lawsuit would be filed, the court refused to lift the freeze that Levin had placed on the royalties. After two years of an impasse, Frank and Levin reached an out-of-court settlement. Frank agreed to pay fifteen thousand dollars to Levin, who dropped all his claims to royalties and rights to the dramatization of the play. Levin remained obsessed by his desire to dramatize the diary.[5] In 1966 he attempted to stage a production in Israel, though he did not have the right to do so, and Frank’s lawyers insisted that it be terminated.{35}
It is against this background that the deniers built their assault on the diary. The first documented attack appeared in Sweden in 1957. A Danish literary critic claimed that the diary had actually been produced by Levin, citing as one of his “proofs” that names such as Peter and Anne were not Jewish names.{36} His charges were repeated in Norway, Austria, and West Germany. In 1958 a German high school teacher who had been a member of the SA and a Hitler Youth leader charged that Anne Frank’s diary was a forgery that had earned “millions for the profiteers from Germany’s defeat.”{37} His allegations were reiterated by the chairman of a right-wing German political party. Otto Frank and the diary’s publishers sued them for libel, slander, defamation of the memory of a dead person, and antisemitic utterances. The case was settled out of court when the defendants declared that they were convinced the diary was not a forgery and apologized for unverified statements they had made.{38}
4
Even after the diary was published to wide acclaim in Europe, American publishers were wary. Ten rejected it before Doubleday published it in 1951. It was an immediate success.