Dutch police said they were investigating the projection of an antisemitic laser message onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam — an incident the prime minister condemned as “reprehensible”.
The message referenced a far-right conspiracy theory that the teenage Holocaust victim was not the author of her famous diary, and images of the projection were shown on a private US Telegram channel.
The Anne Frank House Museum, which preserves the canalside house where the Jewish Frank family hid from the Nazis during World War II, expressed its “shock and revulsion”.
The museum, which receives around a million visitors a year, said it had “reported the incident to the police” and was in contact with the city council and public prosecutors.
It said the projected message read “Ann Frank, inventor of the ballpoint pen” — referring to false claims that the diary was partly written with a type of pen that only came into use after the war.
“With the projection and the (online) video, the perpetrators are attacking the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary and inciting hatred. It is an antisemitic and racist film,” the museum said.
The museum said it found out the message had been projected onto its exterior for several minutes on Monday evening after the footage appeared in a “hate video” on Telegram.
An antisemitic song plays in the background of the video, said Dutch newspaper Het Parool, which first reported the incident.
The claim is based on the discovery of several sheets in ballpoint found among Anne Frank’s papers in the 1980s, but which were in fact left there accidentally by a researcher in the 1960s, Dutch media said.
