Message projected onto Anne Frank House suggests diary was a forgery

Dutch PM Mark Rutte condemned the message saying that there is no room for antisemitism.

Anne Frank in 1940, while at 6. Montessorischool, Niersstraat 41-43, Amsterdam (photo credit: PUBLIC DOMAIN)
Anne Frank in 1940, while at 6. Montessorischool, Niersstraat 41-43, Amsterdam
(photo credit: PUBLIC DOMAIN)

The Netherlands' Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Friday described as "reprehensible" a message projected by laser onto the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam this week suggesting Frank's diary was a forgery or that she had not written it.

Amsterdam police said they were investigating the incident, which took place on Monday evening.

Conspiracy behind the projection

The words projected onto the building referred to Frank as "the inventor of the ballpoint pen," a reference to debunked conspiracy theories about her diary.

Frank, who was Jewish, wrote her diary from July 1942 to August 1944 while in hiding with her family in a cramped secret space above a canal-side warehouse. The museum where the message was projected is now located at the spot.

"There is no place for anti-Semitism in our country, we can never accept this," Rutte said in a statement.

The Anne Frank House and Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, the most popular site on WJT (credit: Dennis van de Water via Shutterstock)
The Anne Frank House and Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, the most popular site on WJT (credit: Dennis van de Water via Shutterstock)

The Anne Frank House said in a statement that images of the incident were circulating on right-wing chat groups and it had referred the matter to police and prosecutors.

Frank and her family was captured by Nazis and she died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, aged 15. Her diary is one of the most important documents to have emerged from the Holocaust.