HarperCollins Publishers Acquires World Rights to Anne Frank: A Cold Case Diary

HarperCollins Publishers announced today that it has acquired World Rights* for Anne Frank: A Cold Case Diary.  Sara Nelson, Vice President and Executive Editor, Harper, acquired the book – one of the most buzzed about titles at the 2018 London Book Fair – from the Marianne Schönbach Literary Agency in the Netherlands who is representing Proditione Media. It answers the question:  Who or what led to the arrest of the Frank family? 

Anne Frank: A Cold Case Diary will be published in summer 2020 by Harper in the US and William Collins in the UK and by HarperCollins simultaneously in 13 languages around the world. 

For over half a century, millions of people have read the classic work, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - the journal the teenager kept while in hiding with her family during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.  The Franks and four other people hiding with them were apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. The diary was retrieved by Miep Gies, who gave it to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the family’s only survivor, just after the war. The diary has since been published in more than 70 languages.  

Making use of new technology and investigative approaches developed over decades, Vincent Pankoke, a retired American FBI agent, leads an international team of police and FBI detectives, criminologists, forensic scientists, FBI profilers, data scientists, psychologists, Artificial Intelligence programmers and renowned historians.  The investigation is supported by relevant organizations from all over the world such as the Anne Frank Foundation; the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies; the United States Holocaust memorial museum; and many others.  Pankoke and his team have discovered thought-to-be-lost Nazi documents as well as unknown connections to the Frank family, all of which combine to shed a whole new light on the case.

Jonathan Burnham, President & Publisher, Harper, says, “This is a milestone acquisition for HarperCollins worldwide; its publication is sure to make a huge impact both in the US and globally. We’re extremely excited to be working on such a significant project, a book which promises to change the way we view history.”

“The story of Anne Frank has haunted me all my life,” says Nelson. “Her diary, which I read in grade school, was the first I understood of World War II and one of the most important books of my childhood.  I’m fascinated by the new materials the investigators have found, and the groundbreaking methods and technology they’re using to rethink a story I, and millions of other readers, thought they knew.”

“This promises to be a landmark publication, and  we at William Collins are thrilled to be supporting this effort to tell the final chapter of an extraordinary girl’s story,” said David Roth-Ey, Executive Publisher, 4th Estate & William Collins.

*HarperCollins has acquired world rights with the exception of Dutch, Hungarian and Serbian languages. As part of its global publishing program, it will publish in the English language around the world as well as in German, Italian, French, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Polish and Japanese. 

About HarperCollins

HarperCollins Publishers is the second largest consumer book publisher in the world, with operations in 18 countries. With two hundred years of history and more than 120 branded imprints around the world, HarperCollins publishes approximately 10,000 new books every year in 17 languages, and has a print and digital catalog of more than 200,000 titles. Writing across dozens of genres, HarperCollins authors include winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Newbery and Caldecott Medals and the Man Booker Prize. HarperCollins, headquartered in New York, is a subsidiary of News Corp (NASDAQ: NWS, NWSA; ASX: NWS, NWSLV) and can be visited online at www.corporate.HC.com.