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February 17,
2022 What else is wrong with the revelations
By Sven Felix
Kellerhoff -Senior Editor History of Welt
The Anne Franks Fonds, which
Anne's father Otto founded in Basel in 1963 to
protect the diary's copyright and ensure that the
proceeds from it are only used for charitable
purposes, has already listed more than a hundred
minor and major errors. Yves Kugelmann, honorary member
of the fund's board of trustees, had an uneasy
feeling even before the Pankoke team started work
and therefore declined to support the project - by
the way, a scene that is described in the book in at
rather peculiar way, one could even say in a for
Kugelman quite damaging manner. For example, the incorrect statement in the
book about the founding of the Anne Frank Foundation in
Amsterdam in 1957 belongs in the category "annoying
but not serious". Otto Frank had supported it, but
it wasn´t started by him. This is a rather similar
easy-to-research, but nevertheless quite complicated
question of who owns the originals of Anne's diary
(correct: the Dutch state).
Really negligible are typos like “June 6” instead of the correct: “July 6” for the Franks’ move in 1942 to the prepared hiding place at Prinsengracht 263, Amsterdam. Even the best editors cannot detect such non-language related errors. What is surprising, however, is the remark
that Otto Frank's English was too bad to emigrate to
the USA. After all, he came from an educated
middle-class family and, after graduating from the
traditional Frankfurt Lessing-Gymnasium, he
completed an internship at the Macy’s department store in New
York and then lived in the USA for almost two years
– which even can be found on Otto Frank's English Wikipedia
page. Finally, the passages in which the Canadian
writer deviates significantly from Anne Frank's
descriptions in the diary are unacceptable. For
example, when asked who took what radio type into
the hiding place and when, or whether Anne witnessed
razzias from her hiding place with her own eyes.
This all shows that Sullivan has only worked
superficially.
“Unrescuable”
"Initially I believed that the German
edition could be rescued with a new foreword," said
the Stuttgart historian Gerhard Hirschfeld. The expert
on contemporary Dutch history and the era of the
world wars, who lived in the Netherlands for a long
time, has now changed his mind: “After another
intensive review of the American edition, I have to
revise myself. A new foreword will probably not be
enough.” The concept of the entire volume is
“unrescuable”. Because the book swings between the
exclusion of the previous suspects, the description
of the Jewish story of suffering and
forensic-criminological evidence, but ultimately
does not do justice to any of these approaches".
Especially since the allegedly decisive
indication for the thesis of the book, that the
Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh had betrayed the
hiding place in the Secret Annex of the Gestapo,
turns out to be at least interpreted incorrectly.
According to The Betrayal of Anne Frank, Otto Frank
is said to have received the original of the
anonymous accusation before December 6, 1945. Historian Gertjan Broek of the Anne
Frank House in Amsterdam: "Rosemary Sullivan's book
claims that Otto Frank's calendar for 1945 records a
visit to an Amsterdam prison to speak to the
imprisoned detective Gringhuis about van den Bergh.
On this date, however, the calendar only mentions
'POD', i.e. the political police.This in no way
means that a particular prisoner was visited or that
a conversation was held. The source simply does not
support the statement.”
This is not the only fact that speaks
against the dating of the anonymous note to autumn
1945. Two years later, Otto Frank filed a criminal
complaint against the former warehouse manager at
Prinsengracht 263, Wilhelm van Maaren. The
investigations revealed that the betrayal of the
hiding place could not be proven. If Otto Frank was
already aware of Van den Bergh's accusation at the
end of 1945, why should he accuse another suspect at
the end of 1947? Finally, Broek pointed out that the note
was first mentioned in March 1958, in an exchange of
letters between Otto Frank and Jo Kleiman: "There is
no reason to believe that Frank kept this note
secret from Kleiman for more than twelve years; in
fact, it is highly improbable, since Kleiman was
Frank's trustee in both business and personal
matters."
The historian comes to the conclusion:
"Everything we know indicates that the anonymous
note was made around the time the Anne Frank
Foundation was founded, probably in early 1958." "The decision that the book would be
published in German by the publishing group was
made in 2018," said publisher
Jürgen Welte, who has been in office since July
2019. The publishing house is currently working "on
a corrected, supplemented and commented
German-language edition to enable all interested
readers to form their own independent opinion on the
book and the associated media discussion".
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