‘Antisemitic’ conspiracy theory projected onto Anne Frank House, officials say

An “antisemitic” message was projected onto the Anne Frank House, an important Jewish Holocaust memorial, in the Netherlands, according to an official statement.

The Anne Frank House is a building in Amsterdam where a Jewish teenager, Anne Frank, and her family hid from the Nazis during World War II, according to the museum’s website. For two years, Anne stayed in hiding, keeping a diary of her experience. She was discovered in 1945 and died in a concentration camp.

Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was the family’s only surviving member, and, after World War II ended, he published her diary and, “in June 1947, 3,000 copies of ‘The Secret Annex’ were printed,” the museum explained. “The Diary of Anne Frank” is “one of the most important testimonies of the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War,” the museum said in a Friday, Feb. 10, news release.

One debunked “extreme right-wing” conspiracy theory claims that Anne’s diary is fake because it was “partly written with a ballpoint pen,” the release explained. Ballpoint pens came into use after World War II. The theory attempts to “question or deny the existence of the Holocaust,” the museum said.

This conspiracy theory fueled the message projected onto the museum for a few minutes on the evening of Monday, Feb. 6, officials said. The message read “(Anne) Frank, inventor of the ballpoint pen,” per the release.

“The ‘ballpoint myth’ is based on the simple fact that around 1960, two notes with ballpoint writing ended up among the original (diary) pages,” according to an article from the museum detailing the authenticity of Anne’s diary. The pages with ballpoint pen were written by a researcher who was studying the diary and were of “no significance to the actual contents of the diary.”

The projection was filmed and “appeared in a hate video on a private Telegram group from the USA,” the museum said.

Anne Frank is honored at a memorial along the Boise River. Built by what is now the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights, the memorial opened in 2002 and was donated to the city of Boise. It has occasionally been vandalized with anti-Semitic messages. In 2020, someone put up stickers displaying swastikas, the symbol of the Nazis, who perpetrated the Holocaust.

In the Netherlands, the Anne Frank House expressed “shock and revulsion” at the incident, according to the release. “With the projection and the video the perpetrators are attacking the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary and inciting hatred. It is an antisemitic and racist film.”

Het Parool, a Dutch newspaper, reported that the video also featured an antisemitic song and numerous clips of Amsterdam.

The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, called the actions reprehensible in a Tweet.

Amsterdam Police told AFP they are investigating the incident. No further details were provided.

The Idaho Statesman contributed. Google Translate was used to translate the original article from Het Parool and the Tweet from Mark Rutte.

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