SOURCE: "Attacks on the Authenticity of the Diary," in The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday, Viking, 1989, pp. 84-101.

In the following essay, Barnouw answers Holocaust revisionists who deny the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary.

The earliest attacks on the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary we could discover in print come in two articles published in November 1957 in the Swedish paper Fria Ord under the heading of "Judisk Psyke—En studie kring Anne Frank och Meyer Levin [Jewish Psyche—A Study Around Anne Frank and Meyer Levin]." Their author was Harald Nielsen, a Danish literary critic. Basing himself on a brief factual report in De Telegraaf of April 11, 1957, Nielsen alleged that the diary owed its final form to Meyer Levin. In support of this opinion, he produced such spurious...