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It shouldn't be a joke at all.

In any case, one of two YouTubers with Tourette syndrome said on a video with TV presenter Kai Pflaume that was posted online in September 2020, as he was pushing a baking sheet with fruit cake into the stove: “In the oven, say hello to Anne Frank for me. “Something like that may really be the effect of the insidious nervous disease that can lead to the uncontrolled discharge of insults.

This only became a case for a court when a descendant of Holocaust survivors who was active against anti-Semitism described the two YouTubers as "Nazis". This, in turn, is understandable, because comments about victims of National Socialist racial madness are in principle always anti-Semitic. The bad thing is that these comments were published without hesitation. Because especially Anne Frank (1929–1945) is a thorn in the side of many right-wing extremists, Holocaust deniers and similar people.

Of course, this has to do with the enormous impact that her diary, written from June 12, 1942 to August 1, 1944 and first published in Dutch in 1947, had worldwide since the 1950s.

Precisely because her notes do not specifically deal with the brutal persecution, but with its consequences for a young girl in a tight hiding place, this text enables an occupation with the Holocaust beyond the almost unimaginable brutality of mass murder.

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As far as is known, a defamatory attack on Anne Frank was first printed in 1958.

Lothar Stielau, a student from Lübeck, who belonged to the right-wing extremist German Reich Party, published an article in the “Journal of the Association of Former Students and Friends of the Oberrealschule zum Dom” which read: “The fake diaries of Eva Braun, Queen of England and Anne Frank's diary, which is not much more authentic, certainly brought in a few million for those who profited from the German defeat, but they hit us hard. "

The only surviving film recording of Anne Frank

This short sequence from the archive of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is the only film recorded by Anne Frank.

It shows her in July 1941 as a spectator at a neighbor's wedding.

Source: Collections Anne Frank House

WELT AM SONNTAG responded with an “answer to a teacher”, written by the writer Ernst Schnabel: “What should one find more hideous - the infamy with which this German teacher mentions Hitler's lover and Hitler's victim in the same breath?

The insidiousness that lies in the remark made by the beneficiaries of the German defeat?

Or the cowardice he shows in trying to pull himself out of the loop? "

This last allegation related to a statement by Stielau that he did not want to doubt that Anne Frank's diary was real.

The "Hamburger Abendblatt", which at the time, like WELT AM SONNTAG, belonged to the Axel Springer publishing house, had printed this letter to the editor.

Stielau now pointed out that the editor of the diary, Anne Frank's father Otto, stated that he had edited the text and slightly shortened it.

A facsimile of Anne Frank's diary in the Anne Frank Center in Berlin.

Only exact copies of the originals are shown in public

Source: picture alliance / dpa

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That was true and was always known, it was already in the foreword or afterword of various editions and, above all, did not change the authenticity of the text at all.

These were mostly very personal remarks by the girl about her mother and the marriage of her parents, which Otto Frank had left out.

Nothing that changed the content of the diary in any way.

Father Frank had filed a criminal complaint against Stielau at the beginning of 1959.

After a detailed examination of the handwritten originals, the Lübeck judiciary found that the diary was genuine, which made it possible to prosecute Stielau.

The retracted his remarks and got away scot-free.

But the seeds of doubt were sown and have continued to sprout ugly flowers ever since.

In 1967 a brochure appeared in the USA, according to which the diary was a "hoax", a forgery.

Eight years later, the British Holocaust denier attacked David Irving, who at the time was still widely regarded as a serious historian,

Anne Frank and her records.

In the same year 1975 a certain Heinz Roth published brochures with titles such as "Anne Frank's diary - a fake" and "Anne Frank's diary - the great swindle".

In the following year Otto Frank obtained an injunction against another pamphlet by Roth with the title "The Diary of Anne Frank - Truth or Forgery?"

Jewelery with a connection to Anne Frank found

Researchers have found a piece of jewelery in the former Nazi extermination camp in Sobibor that is similar to a pendant of Anne Frank.

Apparently it belonged to Karoline Cohn, a possible relative of Frank.

Source: Die Welt / Christin Brauer

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Again the Federal Criminal Police Office proved the authenticity of the recordings forensically.

Roth submitted an "expert opinion" by the French literary scholar Robert Faurisson, which came to the opposite conclusion, but was refuted point by point by experts.

Faurisson, at that time still a lecturer in Lyon, soon developed into the most famous French Holocaust denier.

Otto Frank died in August 1980 at the age of 91.

He left the original writings of his daughter, who died miserably in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, to the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, a highly renowned state archive.

Based on this original, a scientific-critical edition was published in 1986, which should be complete.

Hidden pages in Anne Frank's diary deciphered

For more than 70 years, two pages of Anne Frank's world-famous diary were glued together.

But now the previously illegible lines by the Jewish girl have been published.

Source: WORLD / Kevin Knauer

As the public only found out 32 years later, that was not entirely correct, because at the time two pages had to be left out, which Anne herself had pasted over with brown wrapping paper and thus made illegible.

It was only in 2018 that the content of these pages could be made visible with the latest digital photo technology.

There were four slippery jokes and a passage about sexuality.

A completely revised and then really complete historical-critical edition has been announced for March 2023, published by the President of the German Historical Museum Berlin, Raphael Gross.

No matter what right-wing extremists say online and on social media: Anne Frank's diary is real.

There are texts in various stages of editing and with corrections, but with exactly two exceptions (namely, the underlining of your father with a blue ballpoint pen), all of them can be proven to originate from the author herself.

Anyone who deals with Anne Frank should know that.

Jokes or puns about them are inappropriate in any form - just like about any other victim of the Holocaust.

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