Swedish official suspended after calling Anne Frank ‘immoral’

A Swedish politician who described Anne Frank as “immoral” has been suspended amid an investigation into her comments.

Rebecka Fallenkvist, a member of the country’s far-right Sweden Democrats, made the remarks in a recent Instagram post about Frank, a teenage Holocaust victim who famously authored a diary chronicling her Jewish family’s experiences hiding in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

The Sweden Democrats suspended Fallenkvist after the post, with party media director Oskar Cavalli-Bjorkman slamming her comments as “insensitive and inappropriate,” according to TT, a Swedish news agency.

Israel’s Swedish ambassador also condemned Fallenkvist’s post as a “despicable insult” that is disrespectful of the memory of Anne Frank.”

An image of Anne Frank at a Netherlands exhibit in 2009. (Bas Czerwinski/)

“It comes in sharp contrast to #Sweden’s efforts to preserve the memory of the #Holocaust,” ambassador Ziv Nevo Kulman wrote in a tweet. “Unfortunately, there are many more bad weeds that must be uprooted.”

Fallenkvist claims her comments were taken the wrong way.

“The book is a moving depiction of human good and evil,” Fallenkvist told the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

“The good Anne, who in the first chapters is like any other young girl living her life in peace and finding an interest in boys (which I highlighted), is contrasted with the evil of Nazism,” Fallenkvist continued. “My story was aimed at the good and human in Anne while not playing down the evil to which she was subjected.”

Frank died at a German concentration camp in 1945 at age 15. Her book, “The Diary of a Young Girl,” was first published in Dutch in 1947 and has since been translated to more than 70 different languages.

With News Wire Services