The arrest of Anne Frank, a German-Dutch diarist of Jewish heritage and her subsequent death in a Nazi concentration camp, has been the subject of the book ‘The Betrayal of Anne Frank’ by Rosemary Sullivan. The book has been controversial because of its outlook into who had betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis that had caused a police raid at her hiding place on August 4, 1944. However, Rosemary’s book is now all set to be published in German in a revised and annotated version, a move that is being called historical revisionism by a critic.
In a press statement, Jürgen Welte, the director of HarperCollins Germany, has justified the decision to publish Rosemary Sullivan’s “The Betrayal of Anne Frank” by stating that they want “all interested readers […] to form their own independent opinion of the book and the associated media discussion.” They are currently working on a “corrected, supplemented and annotated German-language edition,” the publisher added.
HarperCollins Germany has chosen to postpone the publication of the German-language version due to the controversy surrounding the book’s distribution in English and other languages. The publisher has yet to set a new publishing date for the book, which was originally scheduled for March.
Yves Kugelmann, Editor of “Tachles,” a Jewish weekly magazine, seems unconvinced about the project. Talking to DW, he said that the publication was inventing a new book genre which was the annotated edition of a book that was full of errors. He also said that the publications of such an erroneous book which can spread false information and rumours among the readership should not be encouraged in the modern world.
In the original book, the investigation work of a Dutch-American team led by former FBI agent Vince Pankoke is detailed by author Rosemary Sullivan. The team claimed to have uncovered who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Gestapo in Amsterdam. With “85 percent probability,” a Jewish notary was named as the guilty party. Critics dubbed the investigation results as speculative and dubious and the book faced a lot of heat in the Netherlands from both historians and Jewish associations, leading to an apology from the Dutch publication. The publication had also assured that a second edition would not be published until the team of investigators had answered the questions raised.
Anne Frank’s father was the sole survivor from her family in the concentration camp and had published Anne’s diary after the war, which reached out to millions of readers around the world.
