• A letter of March 31, 1943, regarding Crematorium III spoke of it having a Gastür, a gas door. Deniers are quick to argue that this could mean many things. But the inventory attached to the handover documents for the crematorium makes short shrift of this argument. The list states that it had a Gasdichtetür, a “gastight door.” One could possibly argue about the meaning of Gastür, but it is hard to squabble over a gastight door.27
The deniers also contended that Birkenau was designed to serve as a quarantine and hospital camp, not a death camp. They based their argument on architectural drawings of April 1943, which contained plans for a barracks for sick prisoners, a prisoners’ hospital, and a quarantine section. Why, they ask, would the Nazis build a health camp but a few hundred yards from gas chambers where people were being annihilated on a massive scale? All this, they assert, indicates that Birkenau was not built as a place of homicide and annihilation.28, 2* But there exists another official drawing of an overall plan of Birkenau, completed approximately a year later. It reveals that Birkenau was anything but a benign hosiptal unit. The first set of plans, completed in April 1943, described a camp that would house 16,600 prisoners. The drawings a year later show a camp that housed 60,000 prisoners and contained less than half of the planned barracks from the preceding year’s plans. The existing barracks housed four times as many people as indicated by the original drawings. Any suggestion of this being a place of healing is contradicted by these conditions.29
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.
The Diary of Anne Frank
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 de
clared that they were convinced the diary was not a forgery and apologized for unverified statements they had made.38
In 1967 American Mercury published an article by Teressa Hendry, entitled “Was Anne Frank’s Diary a Hoax?” in which she suggested that the diary might be the work of Meyer Levin and that if it was, a massive fraud had been perpetrated.39 In a fashion that will by now have become familiar to readers of this book, Hendry’s allegations were repeated by other deniers as established fact. This is their typical pattern of cross-fertilization as they create a merry-go-round of allegations. In Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last, Harwood repeated these charges, unequivocally declaring the diary to be a hoax.40 In one short paragraph in his book, Arthur Butz likewise stated that he had “looked it over” and determined that the diary was a hoax.41
In his 1975 attack on the diary, David Irving relied on the familiar charge that an American court had “proved” that a New York scriptwriter had written it “in collaboration with the girl’s father.” In 1978 Ditlieb Felderer, publisher of the sexually explicit cartoons of Holocaust survivors, produced a book devoted to certifying the diary as a hoax. He repeated the Levin charge but then went on to label Anne a sex fiend and the book “the first child porno.”42 (Some of his chapter titles are indicative of his approach: “Sexual Extravaganza” and “Anne’s Character—Not Even a Nice Girl.” Felderer’s charges are designed to build on what is often part of the inventory of antisemitic stereotypes: Jews, unnaturally concerned about sex, are also producers of pornography designed to corrupt young children.)
In 1975 Heinz Roth, a West German publisher of neo-Nazi brochures, began to circulate pamphlets calling the diary a forgery actually written by a New York playwright. He cited Irving’s and Harwood’s findings as “proof” of his charges. When asked to desist by Otto Frank, he refused, claiming, in the familiar defense used by deniers, that he was only interested in “pure historical truth.” At this point Frank took him to court in West Germany. Roth defended himself by citing statements by Harwood and Butz declaring the diary to be fraudulent. In addition, Roth’s lawyers produced an “expert opinion” by Robert Faurisson, among whose charges to prove the diary fictitious was that the annex’s inhabitants had made too much noise. Anne wrote of vacuum cleaners being used, “resounding” laughter, and noise that was “enough to wake the dead.”43 How, Faurisson asked, could people in hiding, knowing that the slightest noise would be their undoing, have behaved in this fashion and not been discovered?44 But Faurisson quoted the diary selectively, distorting its contents to build his case. When Anne wrote of the use of the vacuum cleaner, she preceded it by noting that the “warehouse men have gone home now.”45 The scene in which she described resounding laughter among the inhabitants of the annex took place the preceding evening—a Sunday night—when the warehouse would have been empty.46 When she wrote that a sack of beans broke open and the noise was enough to “wake the dead,” Faurisson neglected to quote the next sentence in the diary: “Thank God there were no strangers in the house.”47
In his description of his visit to Otto Frank, Faurisson engaged in the same tactics he used in relation to his encounter with the official from the Auschwitz museum. He tried to make it appear as if he had caught Frank in a monstrous lie: “The interview turned out to be grueling for Anne Frank’s father.”48 Not surprisingly Frank’s description of the interchange differs markedly, and he challenged the veracity of much of what Faurisson claimed he said. Faurisson also claimed to have found a witness who was “well informed and of good faith” but who refused to allow his name to be made public. Faurisson assured readers that the name and address of this secret witness had been placed in a “sealed envelope.” As proof of this evidence he included a photograph of the sealed envelope as an appendix to his “investigation.”49 In 1980 the court, unconvinced by Faurisson’s claims, found that Roth had not proved the diary false.
In 1977 charges were again brought against two men in the West German courts for distributing pamphlets charging that the diary was a hoax. The Bundeskriminalamt (The BKA, or Federal Criminal Investigation Bureau) was asked to prepare a report as to whether the paper and writing material used in the diary were available between 1941 and 1944. The BKA report, which ran just four pages in length, did not deal with the authenticity of the diary itself. It found that the materials had all been manufactured prior to 1950–51 and consequently could have been used by Anne. It also observed, almost parenthetically, that emendations had been made in ballpoint pen on loose pages found with the diary. The ink used to make them had only been on the market since 1951.50 (The BKA did not address itself to the substance of the emendations, nor did it publish any data explaining how it had reached this conclusion. When the editors of the critical edition of the diary asked for the data they were told by the BKA that they had none.51)
Given the history of the editing of the diary it is not surprising that these kinds of corrections were made. This did not prevent Der Spiegel from publishing a sensationalist article on the diary which began with the following boldface paragraph: “ ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ was edited at a later date. Further doubt is therefore cast on the authenticity of that document.” The author of the article did not question whether these corrections had been substantive or grammatical, whether they had been incorporated into the printed text, or when they had been made. Nor did he refer to them as corrections as the BKA had. He referred to the possibility of an imposter at work and charged that the diary had been subjected to countless “manipulations.”
These sensationalist observations notwithstanding, Der Spiegel dismissed the charge made by David Irving and other deniers that Levin wrote the diary as an “oft-repeated legend.” It also stressed that those who wished to shed doubt on the diary were the same types who wished to end “gas chamber fraud.”52
On Otto Frank’s death in 1980, the diary was given to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. By that time the attacks on it had become so frequent and vehement—though the charges that were made were all essentially the same—that the institute felt obliged to subject the diary, as well as the paper on which it was written, glue that bound it together, and ink to a myriad of scientific tests in order to determine whether they were authentic. They also tested postage stamps, postmarks, and censorship stamps on postcards, letters, and greeting cards sent by Anne and her family during this period (in addition to the diary the institute examined twenty-two different documents containing writings by Anne and her family). Forensic science experts analyzed Anne’s handwriting, paying particular attention to the two different scripts, and produced a 250-page highly technical report of their findings.
The reports found that the paper, glue, fibers in the binding, and ink were all in use in the 1940s. The ink contained iron, which was standard for inks used prior to 1950. (After that date ink with no, or a much lower, iron content was used.) The conclusions of the forensic experts were unequivocal: The diaries were written by one person during the period in question. The emendations were of a limited nature and varied from a single letter to three words. They did not in any way alter the meaning of the text when compared to the earlier version.53 The institute determined that the different handwriting styles were indicative of normal development in a child and left no doubt that it was convinced that it had all been written in the same hand that wrote the letters and cards Anne had sent to classmates in previous years.
The final result of the institute’s investigation was a 712 page critical edition of the diary containing the original version, Anne’s edited copy, and the published version as well as the experts’ findings. While some may argue that the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation used an elephant to swat a fly, once again it becomes clear that the deniers’ claims have no relationship to the most basic rules of truth and evidence.
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NOTES
Chapter 1. Canaries in the Mine
1. Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello: Jefferson and His Time, vol. 6 (Boston, 1981), pp. 417–18.
2. Marvin Perry, “Denying the Holocaust: History as Myth and Delusion,” Encore American and Worldwide News, Sept. 1981, pp. 28–33.
3. For an example of this see how the deniers have treated Anne Frank’s diary. David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, eds., The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition (New York, 1989), pp. 91–101.
4. The incident occurred at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis on February 9, 1990. It was subsequently revealed that the teacher had been arrested for stealing war memorabilia from a local museum (Indianapolis News, Feb. 16, 1990).
5. Indianapolis Star, Feb. 22 and 23, 1990.
6. The Sagamore, Feb. 26, 1990.
7. “Like your uncle from Peoria,” was how actress Whoopi Goldberg described the neo-Nazi Tom Metzger, whom she hosted on her television show in September 1992. Metzger, an ardent racist and antisemite, advocates the forced racial segregation of blacks. Goldberg acknowledged that he was particularly dangerous because he appeared so civil. Howard Rosenberg, the television critic of the Los Angeles Times, wondered why, if Goldberg recognized this, it was necessary for her to host him on her show. Obviously she had fallen prey to the same syndrome afflicting those who invite the deniers to appear (Los Angeles Times, Sept. 21, 1992).
8. New Orleans Times-Picayune, Aug. 26, 1990.
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