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Anne Frank kept a diary from 12 June 1942 to 1 August 1944. Until spring 1944 she wrote it strictly for herself. Then, one day in 1944, Gerrit Bolkenstein, a member of the Dutch government in exile, announced in a radio broadcast from London that after the war he hoped to collect eyewitness accounts of the suffering of the Dutch people under the German occupation, which could be made available to the public. Impressed by this speech, Anne Frank decided that when the war was over she would publish a book based on her diary.
She began rewriting and editing her diary, improving on the text, omitting passages she didn't think were interesting enough and adding others from memory. The last entry in Anne's diary is dated 1 August 1944. On 4 August 1944, the eight people hiding in the Secret Annexe were arrested.
After the war, when it became clear that Anne was dead, Otto Frank decided to fulfil his daughter's wish and publish her diary. He selected material from versions a and b, editing them into a shorter version later referred to as version c. At the time of the diary's initial publication, in 1947, it was not customary to write openly about sex, and certainly not in books for young adults. Out of respect for the dead, Otto Frank also omitted a number of unflattering passages about his wife and the other residents of the Secret Annexe. Anne Frank who was thirteen when she began her diary and fifteen when she was forced to stop, wrote without reserve about her likes and dislikes.
When Otto Frank died in 1980, he willed his daughter's manuscripts to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam (NIOD). The ANNE FRANK-Fonds in Basle, which as Otto Frank's sole heir had also inherited his daughter's copyrights.
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