I heard Anne Frank's diary was written with a ball point pen.

You heard wrong, you were lied to by a holocaust denying white supremacist.

The origin of the “ballpoint myth” is the four-page report that the Federal Criminal Police Office (the Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) in Wiesbaden, which was published in 1980. In this investigation into the types of paper and ink used in the diary of Anne Frank it is stated that “ballpoint corrections” had been made on some loose sheets. The BKA’s task was to report on all the texts found among the diaries of Anne Frank, and therefore also on the annotations that were made in Anne’s manuscripts after the war.

In short: the “ballpoint myth” is easy to disprove. The careless wording of the BKA report from 1980 – a report that for the rest in no way challenges the authenticity of the diary – or at any rate its openness to several interpretations, has taken on a life of its own in extreme right-wing circles.

The “ballpoint myth” is based on the simple fact that, around 1960, two annotation sheets with ballpoint writing were inserted between the original pages. These texts were written by a graphological researcher, and are not included in any edition of the diary (apart from the Critical Edition, where photos of the annotation sheets are reproduced). In July 2006, the BKA found it necessary to state in a press release that the 1980 investigation cannot be used to call the authenticity of the diary into doubt.

A pen that wasn't invented during the WW2 German occupation. Weird.

Anne did not write her diary in a ballpoint pen.

Shalom

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