(The Hague) The Dutch police announced Friday to investigate the projection of a laser message on the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, an “anti-Semitic” act unacceptable according to the museum and the Prime Minister.
The message referred to a far-right conspiracy theory that the young Holocaust victim was not the author of the famous Logaccording to images of the screening broadcast on a private American account of the social network Telegram.
“It happened this week, it was reported to us and we are investigating it,” an Amsterdam police spokesman told AFP, declining to provide details.
The Anne Frank House museum, which manages the building visited by around one million visitors a year, expressed “shock and revulsion”. He told AFP that he “reported the incident to the police” and was in contact with the city council and the prosecutor’s office.
He clarified that the laser message was, scratching the writer’s first name: “Ann Frank, inventor of the ballpoint pen”, alluding to false claims that the famous diary was partly written with a type of pen that does not began to be used only after the war.
This theory is based on the discovery of several sheets covered with ballpoint pen writings found among Anne Frank’s papers in the 1980s, but which were in fact accidentally left there by a researcher in the 1960s, said Dutch media.
The museum said it discovered the message was projected onto its facade for several minutes on Monday evening after a “hate video” appeared on Telegram.
“With projection and video, the authors attack the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary and incite hatred. This is an anti-Semitic and racist film,” the museum said.
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Diary of Anne Frank
“There is no place for anti-Semitism in our country; we cannot and must never accept this,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on Twitter.
The incident demonstrates the need for laws criminalizing Holocaust denial in the Netherlands, Justice Minister Dilan Yesilgoz-Zegerius added in a tweet.
Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema condemned the act, calling it “pure anti-Semitism”.
The Jewish teenager and her family hid for two years in a secret annex of the house by a canal during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, before being captured in 1944.
Anne and her sister died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Her diary, found by her father Otto, became one of the most influential accounts of the Holocaust, and sold some 30 million of copies.
In January, Dutch police said they were investigating the display of racist slogans on Rotterdam’s Erasmus Bridge during New Year’s Eve festivities.