The purported diary begins on June 12, 1942, and runs to December 5,1942 . It consists of a book that is six by four by a quarter inches. In addition to this first diary, Anne supplemented it with personal letters. Otto said Anne heard Gerrit Bolkestein in a broadcast say: ~ “Keep a diary, and he would publish it after the war”, and that’s why Anne’s father claimed she rewrote her diaries second time in 1944.

In this second edition, the new writer changed, rearranged and occasionally combined entries of various dates.

When Anne allegedly rewrote the diaries, she used a ball point pen, which did not exist in 1945, and the book took on an extremely high literary standard, and read more like a professional documentary than a child’s diary. In Anne’s second edition her writing style, and handwriting, suddenly matured

The actual diary of Anne Frank contained only about 150 notes, according to The New York Times, of October 2 ,1955.

In 1944, German authorities in occupied Holland determined that [factory owner] Otto Frank had been swindling them via his extensive and very lucrative Wehrmacht contracts. The German police then raided his apartment attic, and the eight Jews were sent to Westerbork work camp and forced to perform manual labor. Otto himself was sent to Auschwitz. Anne, her sister Margot, and her mother, subsequently died of typhus in another camp, Bergen-Belsen.

In 1945, after being liberated from German custody, Otto returned to Amsterdam, where he claimed he found Anne’s diary cleverly hidden in the Annex’s rafters. However, another version has a Dutch friend, Meip Geis finding Anne’s diary of fictional events, which she then gave to Otto Frank.

Otto took what he claimed were Anne’s letters and notes, edited them into a book, which he then gave to his secretary, Isa Cauvern, to review. Isa Cauvern and her husband, Albert Cauvern , a writer, authored the first diary.

Questions were raised by some publishers as to whether Isa and Albert Cauvern, who assisted Otto in typing out the work, used the original diaries or whether they took it directly from Mr. Frank’s personal transcription.

American [Jew] author Meyer Levin wrote the third and final edition.

Meyer Levin was an author, and journalist, who lived for many years in France, where he met Otto Frank around 1949.

Born in 1905, Meyer Levin was raised in the section of Chicago notoriously known in the days of gangster warfare as the “Bloody Nineteen Ward.” At the age of eighteen he worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and during the next four years became an increasingly frequent contributor to the national literary magazine, The Menorah Journal. In 1929 he published THE REPORTER, which was the first of his sixteen novels.

In 1933 Levin became an assistant editor and film critic at the newly-created Esquire Magazine where he remained until 1939.

Perhaps his best-known work is COMPULSION (1956), chronicling the Leopold and Loeb case [two young, rich Jews, perfect psychopaths, did a thrill-killing of another young Jew] and hailed by critics as one of the greatest books of the decade. The compelling work was the first “documentary novel” or “non-fiction novel.”

After the enormous success of COMPULSION, Levin embarked on a trilogy of novels dealing with “the Holocaust.” The first, EVA (1959) was the story of a Jewish girl’s experiences throughout the war and her adjustment to life after the concentration camps. This was followed by THE FANATIC (1963), which told the hypnotic story of a Jewish poet dealing with the moral questions that arose from his ordeal at the hands of the Nazis. The last in the triptych, THE STRONGHOLD (1965), is a thriller set in a concentration camp during the last days of the war.

At the outset of World War II Levin made documentary films for the US Office of War Information and later worked in France as a civilian expert in the Psychological Warfare Division. He eventually became a war correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, with the special mission of uncovering the fate of Jewish concentration camp prisoners. Levin took his role very seriously, sometimes entering concentration camps ahead of the tanks of the liberating forces in order to compile lists of the survivors.

After the war Levin went to Palestine and turned his attention again to the motion picture camera. His film MY FATHER’S HOUSE told the story of a child survivor searching for his family in Palestine. He wrote this story as a novel as well and the book was published in 1947.

Levin also joined the Haganah underground and helped smuggle Jews from the interior of Poland to Palestine, then basically an Arab country under the control of the British..

In 1951 Levin came upon a copy of the French edition of the Anne Frank diary He made a number of attempts to have the work published in English, and conceived it as a play and film. When the diary finally found an American publisher, his play was accepted for production but then suddenly barred, ostensibly for being “unstageworthy,” and another writer’s version was commissioned.

Levin fought for the rights to perform his version of the play, claiming that the real reason the producers refused to stage his work was because they thought it “too Jewish.” He saw the suppression of the play as an extension of the Stalinist attack on Jewish culture and, outraged that even Anne Frank could be censored, he took the producers to court and began an agonizing, prolonged struggle that dragged on for years.

Levin eventually won a jury award against the producers for appropriation of ideas, but the bitterness of the trial made him many enemies in the Jewish and literary communities.

Although Levin’s version of the play is still banned by the owners of the dramatic rights, underground productions of the work are frequently staged throughout the world.

Meyer Levin died in 1981.

Levin rewrote the various post-war treatments of the Anne Frank diary with an eye toward a Broadway production, but Otto decided to cut him out, refusing to honor his contract or pay him for his work. Meyer Levin sued Otto Frank for his writings, and the New York Supreme court awarded Meyer Levin $50,000, for his ‘intellectual work’.

In 1980, Otto sued two Germans, Ernst Römer and Edgar Geiss, for distributing literature denouncing the diary as a forgery. The trial produced a study by official German handwriting experts that determined everything in the diary was written by the same person, and the person that wrote the diaries had used a ballpoint pen throughout. Unfortunately for Herr Frank, the ballpoint pen was not available until 1951, whereas Anne was known to have died of typhus in 1944.

Because of the lawsuit in a German court, the German state forensic bureau, the Bundes Kriminal Amt [BKA] forensically examined the manuscript, which at that point in time consisted of three hardbound notebooks and 324 loose pages bound in a fourth notebook, with special forensic equipment.

The results of tests, performed at the BKA laboratories, showed that “significant” portions of the work, especially the fourth volume, were written with a ballpoint pen. Since ballpoint pens were not available before 1951, the BKA concluded those sections must have been added subsequently. 

In the end, the BKA clearly determined that none of the diary handwriting matched known examples of Anne’s handwriting. The German magazine, Der Spiegel, published an account of this report alleging that (a) some editing postdated 1951; (b) an earlier expert had held that all the writing in the journal was by the same hand; and thus (c) the entire diary was a postwar fake.