Anne Frank revised her own diary

After hearing a Dutch government broadcast asking people to preserve wartime documents, Anne Frank began revising earlier diary entries for possible publication. The surviving text therefore includes both immediate writing and a young author’s deliberate reworking of her record.

Later editions also reflect editorial decisions, initially by Otto Frank and subsequently by scholarly editors. This does not make the diary inauthentic; it makes its textual history visible. The firsthand witness was also a writer considering an audience. Readers should distinguish her revisions from later editing and both from independently documented Holocaust history.