Antisemitic projection at Anne Frank House in Amsterdam

"On the evening of Monday February 6, 2023, the antisemitic text 'Ann Frank [sic], inventor of the ballpoint pen' was projected on the Anne Frank House for a few minutes. Footage of this has appeared in a hate video on a private Telegram group from the USA," the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam wrote on its website last Friday.

The statement alludes to a conspiracy theory by right-wing groups who allege the diary was written with a ballpoint pen, which was not yet in use during Anne Frank's time, and hence a forgery. 

Dutch newspaper Het Parool, which first reported the incident, said an antisemitic song played in the background of the video.

"With the projection and the video the perpetrators are attacking the authenticity of Anne Frank's diary and inciting hatred," a statement on the Anne Frank House website said. "It is an antisemitic and racist film. We are acutely aware of what this means for the Jewish community and for the city of Amsterdam as a whole."

Meanwhile, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called the projection "reprehensible" and said there was no place for antisemitism in the Netherlands. 

Dutch police are investigating the case.

Holocaust deniers reject history

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, and had a sister, Margot, who was three years older.

Soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, Anne Frank and her family fled to the Netherlands and resided in Amsterdam.

However, the city ceased to be a safe haven after the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939 and the Netherlands a year later.

Anne and her family went into hiding in a secret annex behind her father's office in Amsterdam. It was there that she wrote her diary until 1944, when her family was betrayed and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. A year later, Anne Frank and her sister died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She was 16 years old.

After the war, Anne Frank's father published her diaries, considered one of the most important testimonies of the persecution of Jews during World War II.

However, there are several books, websites, and pamphlets that claim her diary was forged and that it was partly written with a ballpoint pen, which was not in common use at the time.

Most who claim the diary is a forgery fall into the category of Holocaust deniers — meaning those who contest the fact that six million Jews were systematically exterminated by the Nazis during World War II, and try to prove that Nazism was far less malevolent than represented in historical texts.

Refuting the conspiracy theory

According to the website of the Anne Frank House, which explains in detail the reasons why the claims of a fake diary gained traction, the origin of the "ballpoint myth" dates back to a four-page report published by the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in 1980.

The report listed findings of an investigation into the types of paper and ink used in all texts attributed to Anne Frank, including the annotations made in the manuscripts after the war. The report stated that "ballpoint corrections" had been made on some loose sheets.

However, Dutch investigators in the mid-1980s proved that the writing in ballpoint was only found on two loose pages of annotations, which were clearly placed between the other pages later.

Researchers also concluded that the handwriting on these loose sheets was different from the writing in the diary to a "far-reaching degree," according to a report on the Anne Frank House website.

In 1987, the family of Dorothea Ockelmann, a graphologist from Hamburg who studied the diary in the 1960s, wrote that the annotations on the loose sheets had been made by her.

In 2006, the German BKA also published a statement saying the 1980 investigation could not be called on to cast doubt on the authenticity of the diary.

mg/sb (AFP, dpa)