Demolishing the Claims of Holocaust Deniers Against the Diary, Part One

^Yeah, I'll come up with a catchier post title later.

From time to time on this blog, I hope to highlight the logical and historical poverty of Holocaust deniers by using the Diary (mostly the Critical Edition) to demolish their most ridiculous attacks on Anne Frank and her work -- one of their very favorite targets.

A cherished tactic used to discredit the Diary is to claim that one or another of the many historical events Anne refers to in the diary would have been unknown to someone like her (i.e., a Jew in hiding).

Thus, we find gems like these:

It's interesting in many, many places but I found this especially telling:

"Our many Jewish friends are being taken away by the dozen. . . We assume that most of them are murdered. The English radio speaks of their being gassed."

This entry from her liary was entered on 9 October 1942 which means that Ms. Frank (while hiding in a warehouse in Amsterdam with seven other people) was aware of the gassings but Winston Churchill was not?

Which is total garbage.

According to the Revised Critical Edition, the reference to gassing is actually not in the original draft of the entry for October 9, 1942, but in the rewritten version (known as version B), written sometime in the spring of 1944, when Nazi atrocities against the Jews were certainly common knowledge in every Allied government, to say nothing of people living under Nazi rule.

And even if the gassing of Jews really had been a part of the original entry, a footnote in the Critical Edition at the bottom of the this passage and sourced to the Written Archives Center of the BBC kindly points out that:

In June 1942 the British press and the BBC began to refer to the gassings in Poland. Thus the 6 p.m. news on the BBC Home Service on July 9, 1942, included the following item: "Jews are regularly killed by machinegun fire, hand grenades - and even poisoned by gas.

The reference doesn't necessarily have to be to Auschwitz-like gas chambers, either: The Nazis had been using mobile gas vans as early as 1940 to kill the mentally ill, and they were extensively used at Chelmno, the Nazis' first extermination camp, by the end of 1941.