The slightly ‘naughtier’ side of Anne Frank.

On June 25, 1947, the diary of Anne Frank is posthumously published when her father, Otto Frank, prints the first 1,500 copies in Dutch. Otto Frank had made the first transcription in German in 1946. In spring 1946 it had come to the attention of Dr. Jan Romein and his wife Annie Romein-Verschoor, two Dutch historians. They were so moved by it that Anne Romein made unsuccessful attempts to find a publisher, which led Romein to write an article for the newspaper Het Parool:

“This apparently inconsequential diary by a child, this ‘de profundis’ (which refers to Psalm 130) stammered out in a child’s voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg put together.

— Jan Romein in his article “Children’s Voice” on Het Parool, 3 April 1946.

This caught the interest of Contact Publishing in Amsterdam, who approached Otto Frank to submit a…