The case has caused great shock in the Netherlands.
A Dutch court on Thursday convicted a Polish-Canadian man of expressing Holocaust denial against the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, in a case that sparked shock in the Netherlands.
The court in Amsterdam sentenced the man, identified as 42-year-old Robert W., to two months in prison, less than the six months requested by prosecutors.
This time W. was already in pre-trial detention and was released two weeks ago before the verdict.
In February, he beamed the message “Ann (sic) Frank, inventor of the ballpoint pen” with a laser onto the side of the building where the teenager hid from the Nazis and wrote her world-famous diary.
This was a reference to a far-right, Holocaust-denying conspiracy theory that the diary is fake because it contained pages written in ballpoint pen and was put into use years after World War II.
The widely debunked myth stems from the fact that a researcher left two notes written in ballpoint pen between the original pages around 1960.
The court said the message sent to the home “significantly exceeded the limits of what is considered acceptable in society.”
“The suggestion that Anne Frank invented the ballpoint pen casts doubt on the authenticity of her diary. Given the enormous symbolic importance of Anne Frank’s diary for the memory of the Holocaust, this can be seen as a form of Holocaust denial,” the verdict said. added.
The Anne Frank House Museum, which preserves the canal house where the Jewish Frank family hid from the Nazis, expressed “shock” and “disgust” after the projection came to light.
At the time, Prime Minister Mark Rutte condemned the ‘reprehensible’ act, while Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema called it ‘pure anti-Semitism’.
After hiding from the Nazis for two years, Anne Frank and her family were captured during a raid in 1944. The teenager and her sister died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.
Her diary, found by her father Otto, became one of the most moving stories of the Holocaust, selling some 30 million copies.
“Anne Frank’s diary is one of the most important accounts of the persecution of Jews during the Second World War,” said the museum, which receives about a million visitors annually.
“Attacks on the authenticity of the diary… have been spread for decades – and now increasingly online – mainly for anti-Semitic motives,” the museum added.
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