Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  She sounds like an American girl. And why not? It’s an American movie. We’re the cavalry that rides over the hill. In this case the cavalry did its best, but its best wasn’t good enough to save Anne. D-day is a major event, and the film utilizes Stevens’s footage of the invasion. When his actors failed to respond with sufficient excitement to the news of the American landing on the Normandy beaches, George Stevens played them “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  You can watch Stevens’s D-day footage on YouTube. The distorted color of the degraded film stock gives it an otherworldly beauty. There’s a particularly lovely shot of battleships, silhouetted against the horizon, floating beneath a sky dotted with surveillance balloons. A link takes you to a clip identified only as “Auschwitz Liberation. Rare Russian footage.” It’s narrated in German and seems to have been made for German TV. A small band of Russian soldiers are running across the fields, falling and stumbling in the deep white snow drifts. Next we see the newly freed prisoners, one by one, men with faces of great strangeness and striking individuality. Then come images of mass graves, corpses in the snow, prisoners of all ages, including children.

  The harrowing film reminds you of what was forgotten in the haste to make Anne’s diary a lucrative, popular, and morally improving commodity. The camps, the prisoners, and the innocent dead tell the truth beneath the wheeling and dealing of the Broadway and Hollywood productions, beneath the drafts, the rewrites, the lawsuits and disappointments, beneath the simultaneously innocent and cynical American story that ended with a fashion model explaining that despite everything, she still believes that people are good at heart.

  NINE

  Denial

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1998, HELEN CHENOWETH, THEN the controversial right-wing-Republican congressional representative from Idaho, a strong opponent of gun control and of environmental protections, was obliged to dissociate herself from a political consultant named Robert Boatman, who had produced several video ads for Chenoweth’s campaign.

  Three years before, the Anne Frank Foundation had sent its traveling exhibition to Boise. Inspired by the program, local residents had launched a drive to fund the construction of a human-rights educational park. Named in honor of Anne Frank, the park would be located on the bank of the Boise River. The planners announced that they had already raised almost $400,000.

  This announcement triggered something in Mr. Boatman, who wrote a letter to the editors of the Idaho Statesman that began, “When a 50-year-old snapshot of a sickly teenager from halfway around the world appears on the front page of the Statesman, you know someone’s political agenda is stirring. The perpetuation of the Anne Frank myth by gullible and guilt-ridden crybabies is a slander of truth and a slap in the face of history.” The letter went on to claim that Otto Frank had “discovered” and “typed up” the book and subsequently made millions and in the process become “the darling of leftist terrorist groups like the Jewish Defense League and the Wiesenthal Center.”

  After Representative Chenoweth fired Mr. Boatman, he faded into a shadowy niche of the far-right-wing free-speech pantheon. He is the author of several books on high-speed revolvers, including one on how to “customize” your Glock—a euphemism for turning a handgun into an automatic weapon.

  Helen Chenoweth remained in office until 2001.

  IN THE 1960s and ’70s, a movement formed, and spread with alarming rapidity, dedicated to championing and publicizing its members’ conviction that the Holocaust had never occurred, that the Nazis had never built or used gas chambers and crematoria, and that the number of Jewish World War II dead had been wildly exaggerated. The Nazis themselves had prepared the groundwork for these specious claims, destroying the evidence of the methods used at the extermination camps and employing euphemisms such as “resettlement” and “relocation” for deportation and mass murder.

  Aided by neo-Nazis, gathered under the banner of organizations that have included the Institute for Historical Review and the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, these so-called Holocaust revisionists have challenged the so-called exterminationist theorists by placing ads in newspapers and establishing Web sites. Despite the fact that Holocaust denial is illegal in many countries, it has proliferated, drawing some of its most active supporters from the former Soviet Union. It has also gained currency in the Muslim world, where its most visible proponent is Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has stated that the Holocaust is a Zionist myth, and who, in 2006, assembled, in Tehran, an International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust.

  If the Holocaust is a fabrication, then it stands to reason—according to the mad logic of “historical revisionism”—that Anne Frank’s diary must be a fraud. The first to say so in print was Harald Nielsen, a Danish critic, who, in 1957, published an essay in a Swedish newspaper claiming that the diary was partly the work of an American writer named Meyer Levin. Nielsen’s charges were echoed, the next year, by a Norwegian journalist who went further and claimed that the diary was a fake. Surely the most regrettable and unforeseeable consequence of the conflict over the dramatization of Anne’s book was that Holocaust deniers would use Levin’s lawsuit against Otto Frank as “proof” that the two men had conspired and collaborated to forge a young girl’s diary. Why else would two Jews sue each other in a New York court for breach of contract and plagiarism?

  In 1958, Lothar Stielau, a high school English teacher in Germany and a former Hitler Youth leader, wrote an essay claiming that Anne’s journal was sentimental and pornographic, and equated it with the counterfeit diary of Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. During an official investigation, Stielau took the semantic defense, admitting that instead of the German word for fake he should probably have used the word for seriously altered. He was defended by a right-wing German political leader, Heinrich Buddeberg, who repeated the accusation that Meyer Levin had been involved in the forgery. Stielau was fired from his job, and both Stielau and Buddeberg were sued by Otto Frank for libel and defamation.

  Given that Otto Frank had begun to see himself as Anne’s emissary of forgiveness, given that he had declined to prosecute the Nazi officer who arrested his family, or to expose the man who had betrayed their hiding place, his decision to take legal action meant that Stielau and his supporters must have angered and alarmed him. He intuited that Stielau’s charges would be repeated and taken up by others, as indeed they were. Unfortunately, the trial failed to serve as a deterrent.

  The prosecution argued that the diary needed to be authenticated, since so many vengeful factions were at that point trying to make the Germans look bad. The lawyers mentioned an article in Der Spiegel asserting that Anne’s work had been heavily edited by Albert Cauvern, one of the friends to whom Otto had first shown the manuscript. Miep and Jan Gies and Bep Voskuijl were brought into court to swear that Anne actually did keep a diary, the same one they had given Otto. Forensic handwriting experts convinced the judge that the diary was authentic.

  Still, the case dragged on for three years. Stielau again clarified the point he’d tried to make: he meant the play, not the diary. The play was the fraud. In 1961, the lawyers settled. The defendants admitted that the diary was authentic; they apologized and stated that they hadn’t meant to offend Otto Frank or the memory of his daughter. Nearly all of Stielau’s fine was paid by the German state.

  But the verdict in Otto’s favor would only have convinced those who already agreed with it. From then on, the books and tracts challenging the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary proliferated like an evil chain letter, each building on the others’ demented fantasies as if they were proven truths. Their writers spent pages discussing the “fact” that the forgers were so stupid they wrote Anne’s diary in ballpoint pen—ink that was not in use before 1944. They were uninterested in hearing that only six pages, in the entire diary, are numbered in ballpoint ink, apparently in Otto Frank’s hand. The rest had been written with a fountain pen, and all of it was written by Anne Frank.

  In 196
7, the American Mercury ran an essay by Teressa Hendry, reviving the charges that Meyer Levin wrote the diary, and using, again as proof, the court decision, later reversed, ordering Otto to pay $50,000 in damages to his “race-kin” (in Hendry’s phrase) Meyer Levin. The Mercury had been founded in the 1920s by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, and several changes of management later had become the paper of record for the racist intelligentsia.

  The most chilling aspect of Hendry’s essay is its reasonable, quasi-academic tone. Beginning with a nod to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it cites the question that Abraham Lincoln is said to have asked Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war?” Hendry riffs briefly on the power of propaganda and on the cleverness with which Communists have used the nonexistent threat of Hitler and Nazism to divert the world’s attention from the “live threat” of Stalin and Khrushchev. Then Hendry goes into the details of the Levin-Frank suit, and asks why this case has never been “officially reported.” After noting that both Levin and Frank are Jewish, so they cannot be accused of anti-Semitism, no matter what vile lies they tell about Jews, Hendry ends with a plea for truth. “If Mr. Frank used the work of Meyer Levin to present to the world what we have been led to believe is the literary work of his daughter, wholly or in part, then the truth should be exposed…To label fiction as fact is never justified nor should it be condoned.”

  The claim that the diary is a forgery has since been echoed by prominent Holocaust deniers, among them Richard Harwood, author of Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last, and David Irving, who also cited the Levin court case as evidence of Otto Frank’s complicity in perpetrating the fraud of his daughter’s work. When Otto Frank protested, Irving’s publishers removed the accusation from his book, Hitler and His Generals, and Irving was ordered to pay damages to the Anne Frank Foundation.

  Still more pamphlets were published by a German named Heinz Roth, denouncing the diary as a swindle. The leaflets he distributed at a 1976 Hamburg performance of The Diary of Anne Frank aroused the interest of a German prosecutor, who issued an injunction prohibiting Roth from handing out his broadsides. In Roth’s defense, his lawyers cited a book that would become a sacred text to those who challenged the diary’s authenticity, The Diary of Anne Frank—Is It Authentic? by Robert Faurisson, an early champion of the idea that the lying fairy tale of gas chambers and crematoriums had been perpetrated by the Allies and Jews to defame the heroic Nazi party.

  Subsequent cases against later pamphleteers were dismissed on technicalities or on the grounds of free speech, a fundamental principle that inspired Noam Chomsky to write the introduction to one of Faurisson’s books. Only one journalist, Edgar Geiss, arrested for distributing pamphlets in the courtroom where a colleague’s case was being tried, received a criminal sentence. He was given a year in prison for defamation, a judgment he later appealed.

  DITLIEB Felderer’s 1979 Anne Frank’s Diary, A Hoax is still among the most repellent attacks on the diary. It is at once tedious and terrifying to attempt to follow the lunatic convictions that keep Felderer (an Austrian Jew who became a Jehovah’s Witness, emigrated to Sweden, and was won over to the “revisionist” cause while investigating the Nazi persecution of his fellow Witnesses) raving for page after page, spinning a seamless web of pure, poisonous hate.

  Only the like-minded, or those with strong stomachs, could read more than a few lines of his rant, all in the name of history, truth, science, common sense, and inside information. Today, an Internet search of his name directs one to a site headlined “To inform man is not a business but an obligation” and “limited censorship is the root of all terrorism.” According to the text, “Ditlieb Felderer’s Flyers have come out in the millions in spite of corrupt Politicians Fahrenheit 451ing them over and over. To see the various court records surrounding his censorship trials, Biblical sex photos and discussion, blog, studies of medieval history, controversies, dissent…” There is a link to a site that lists Anne Frank and Auschwitz as well as “holocaust-sex” and “pornocaust.”

  One learns from Felderer’s book that the wearing of the six-pointed star was the Jews’ own idea, a “fact” proved by a slogan, allegedly coined by a Zionist weekly, exhorting fellow Jews to wear the badge proudly. Apparently, the star was something like a professional or guild badge, or like the lapel pin worn by the French Legion of Honor. We read about Otto’s Frankfurt family, “wallowing in wealth,” Jews characteristically not satisfied with owning a little piece of Germany and wanting to possess the whole country. Felderer goes into detail to establish the fact that the windows of the secret annex could not have been covered with paper, as the diary claims, that the adult males could not have been heavy smokers without alerting the warehouse staff, that the annex residents ate like kings, though (paradoxically) they could not have cooked without their presence being detected.

  The very idea of the helpers spending the night in the annex strikes Felderer as so reckless that the diary entries describing these overnights are in themselves enough to prove that the book is a lie. No sensible Dutch person would save a journal full of anti-German insults in a desk drawer where any German could discover it. And why would Anne have kept her diary in her father’s briefcase, where her father could have found it and have read her filthy little secrets—a question that, among other things, betrays a failure to understand the respect for privacy, even the children’s, that kept the annex residents civilized and sane.

  The worst parts are the dirty bits. Felderer calls the diary, “the first pedophile pornographic work to come out after World War II and sold on the open market. In fact, the descriptions by a teenage girl over her sex affairs may likely be the first child porno ever to come out.” He suggests that the “sex portions” may be made up, invented by adult men in order to sell a book that otherwise might have wound up among Otto Frank’s private papers. As upsetting as it is to imagine Otto Frank using his daughter “in such a filthy manner,” Felderer points out, evil parents regularly prostitute their children, “so why could literary prostitution not be possible?”

  “Apparently the ‘sexy’ portions were too much even for some Jews to stomach, and one of the first, if not the only group, to voice their objections against the diary, were some Orthodox Jews who felt it gave the Jews a bad moral image…Whether their objections were based on true moral grounds or for fear that the story was letting the cat out of the bag may be debatable. Talmudic sources are certainly not foreign to perverse sex.”

  Just when one imagines that things cannot possibly get uglier, Felderer includes a section entitled “the Anal Complex,” in which he makes a seeming half turn and argues for the possible authenticity of the diary. The only reason the diary might be the real thing is “its preoccupation with the anus and excrements, a trait typical of many Jews. Pornography and excretal fantasies have always fascinated many of them and they have therefore also been the greatest exploiters of these things.”

  He cites Anne’s account of the schedule for using the lavatory, as well as her unselfconscious description of the problems that flatulence caused in the airless attic. Among the other anally fixated Jews whom Felderer accuses along with Anne Frank are Sigmund Freud and Charlie Chaplin. Though Chaplin was not, strictly speaking, Jewish, he was constantly scratching his buttocks, and, in one film, he lampooned Hitler, all of which made him Jewish by association. Felderer wonders why no Nobel Prize has yet been awarded for the “science” of anal eroticism.

  THESE and other attacks on the diary were, in part, what prompted the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation to engage the State Forensic Science Laboratory to undertake the investigation that produced more than 250 pages of findings proving the diary’s authenticity. Experts examined and dated the physical materials from which the diary is made—paper, glue, ink, fibers from the cover—to prove that they were in use before 1944.

  The pictures and postcards Anne pasted into her journal were also examined and dated, but mos
t of the study involved an analysis of her handwriting. The Critical Edition includes an exhaustive account of characteristics and microcharacteristics, spacing arrangements and interaction points, “the movement component vertical to the writing plane” and changes in pen pressure. The conclusions are clear. Both the block printing of the early pages, and the cursive of the later entries and of the revisions, are those of the same girl. Anne Frank’s handwriting changed in ways that fell well within the predictable parameters for a period of two years. The corrections added by other hands at a later date are as minor as they are rare.

  Though the attacks on Anne Frank’s diary were loathsome, the publication of The Critical Edition—which features the findings of the forensic investigators, as well as numerous reproductions of pages from the diary that illustrate and confirm the committee’s findings—is a cause for gratitude. For the first time, readers could, if they wished, compare the three versions of the diary and get a sense of how Anne Frank’s style developed and what she meant to include in Het Achterhuis.

  None of this impressed those who believed the diary was a fraud. The Critical Edition failed to persuade Holocaust revisionists who preferred the idea of two old Jews making a fortune by faking the diary and perpetrating Zionist lies about gas chambers and camps. The diary’s critics argued that the variant drafts were further evidence that it was a counterfeit.

  Shortly after the publication of The Critical Edition, the New York Times reported that attacks on the diary had increased. “We never had illusions that this would stop the hoax claims,” an official of the Anne Frank Foundation told a Times reporter. “But it was surprising the way neo-Nazis in Austria, for example, rejoiced at all this new information and insisted the Dutch government had offered proof of the falsity of the diary.”