by David Sims

THE COPYRIGHT to the book The Diary of Anne Frank is owned by the Anne Frank Fund of Basel, Switzerland. Because Anne Frank died of typhus in 1945, any book written by her would have entered the public domain in 2015. To prevent that (so they can keep profiting from sales), the Fund has admitted that much of the text was interpolated after the end of World War 2 by Otto Frank, who was Anne Frank’s father. (ILLUSTRATION: Otto Frank, collage artist and salesman extraordinaire.)

Of course, this has been known in certain circles for quite some time. Parts of the text, although attributed to Anne Frank, show a distinctly different handwriting. Also, parts of the text were originally written with ink from a ballpoint pen, and those first came into popular use in 1951. There has long been a number of tell-tale clues that The Diary of Anne Frank isn’t what it purports to be, but rather is largely fictional and written by someone other than Anne Frank.