Admin l Friday, February 10, 2023
NETHERLANDS – The Anne Frank Foundation filed a criminal complaint on Friday over an anti-Semitic message projected by unknown persons earlier in the week across the Anne Frank House in the Netherlands.
On the night of February 6, text projected on the exterior of the building misspelled Frank’s first name. The text read: “Ann Frank, inventor of the ballpoint pen,” suggesting that the world-famous diary of the young Jewish girl, who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, was forged.
The message refers to a far-right conspiracy theory that the diary was written with a ballpoint pen, which only started to be used on a widespread basis after World War II.
A video of the projection was later circulated in a private Telegram group.
“There is no place for anti-Semitism in our country,” said Prime Minister Mark Rutte. “We can not and must not ever accept this.”
According to the Anne Frank House, “the perpetrators are attacking the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary and inciting hatred.” They’re also denying the Holocaust and the murder of several million Jewish people by the Nazis, it said.
After fleeing Germany, Anne Frank lived in hiding with her and another family in a secret annex on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, where she wrote her diary.
However, the families were betrayed and deported. Anne died in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945.
Her diary was published after the end of the war, and the house is now visited by over 1 million people every year.
Recently, there have been several similar anti-Semitic incidents in the Netherlands, in which far-right extremist messages have been projected onto well-known public buildings. There are no concrete clues about the perpetrators.
