Anne Frank's Numeric Substitution Cipher

On April 2nd, 2025, I began exploring www.annefrankmanuscripten.org/, a website that contains Anne Frank's diaries. I did not expect to find two substitution ciphers from Frank, and I knew immediately that I wanted to make note of these.

However, I must make some disclaimers. First, if you click that link, you might find that it's blocked in your country, as it was for me. I used a VPN to get around that, so if the people who own the copyright to Anne Frank's work get mad at me, I will do my best to comply and remove this webpage. Secondly, I don't know Dutch. I'm pretty sure that's the language that the site used. While Google translate is cool, I have increased doubts about how well I am actually cataloguing this code. And last, I don't know a lot about history --I haven't even read all of the famous book of Anne Frank's diary writing. So I just want to disclose that I am not an expert on these topics.

Disclaimers disclosed, this is a substitution cipher that pairs each of the 26 letters of the alphabet to a number. Interestly, similar numbers are clumped together, but the order seems to be random. Maybe Frank used some method to get this configuration, or maybe it's a random order.

Below are screenshots from the website: