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Criticisms of the diary

Anne Frank's story has become symbolic of the scale of Nazi atrocities during the war, a stark exemplar of Jewish suffering under Adolf Hitler, and a dire warning of the consequences of racism and persecution. However, claims that Anne Frank’s diary was fabricated are a common element of Holocaust denial.^[5]

Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson have claimed that the diary is a forgery,^[6] though critical and forensic studies of the text and the original manuscript have demonstrated its authenticity.^[7] Simon Wiesenthal researched the arrest of the Frank family and in 1963 located Karl Silberbauer, the officer who arrested the Frank family. Silberbauer supported the diary's version of events as accurate and said that during the arrest he saw Anne Frank's diaries and manuscripts as he emptied them from a briefcase used to remove items stolen from the prisoners.

Otto Frank had stated that prior to the book's publication he cut many passages from the original manuscript that he thought would be of little interest to the general reader and that he had assigned pseudonyms to protect the identities of those Anne Frank had mentioned by name. Some, such as David Irving, have suggested this was evidence that the published version was not an accurate transcription of the manuscripts, and even that the work had been written wholly or partly by Otto Frank or one of his associates. In his will, Otto Frank bequeathed his daughter's original manuscripts to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. After Frank's death in 1980, the Institute commissioned a forensic study of the manuscripts. The material composition of the original notebooks as well as the ink and handwriting found within them and the loose version were extensively examined. In 1986 the results were published. The handwriting was found to be consistent with known examples of Anne Frank's handwriting. The paper, ink and glue found in the diaries and loose papers were consistent with materials available in Amsterdam during the period in which the diary was written.^[7]

The survey of her manuscripts compared an unabridged transcription of Anne Frank's original notebooks with the entries she expanded and clarified on loose paper in a rewritten form and the final edit as it was prepared for the U.S publication. The investigation revealed that all of the entries in the published version were accurate transcriptions of manuscript entries in Anne Frank's handwriting, and that they represented approximately a third of the material collected for the initial publication. The magnitude of edits to the text is comparable to other historical diaries such as those by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin in that they all revised their diaries after the initial draft, and the material was posthumously edited into a publishable manuscript by their respective husbands.