Man sentenced for projecting antisemitic conspiracy theory onto Anne Frank House Museum

A prominent member of a neo-Nazi group was sentenced to two months in prison for projecting an antisemitic conspiracy theory onto the Anne Frank House Museum, the Amsterdam building in which Frank and her family hid from Nazis during World War II.

Robert Wilson, a Polish-Canadian national, had been charged with insulting a group and inciting discrimination for casting the scrolling phrase “Ann [sic] Frank invented the ballpoint pen” onto the side of the museum in February with a laser projector mounted in his van.

Though the words seem innocuous, they are a reference to a nonsense conspiracy theory that the Jewish teen’s famous diary was a forgery.

The incident sparked immediate outrage through the Netherlands, with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte condemning what he called a “reprehensible” act.

“We can never and should never accept this,” Rutte posted on X at the time.

The court seemed to agree on Thursday.

“Given the great symbolic significance of Anne Frank’s diary for the commemoration of the persecution of the Jews, this statement can be regarded as a form of Holocaust denial,” the court wrote in its decision.

Wilson — who was not in court for the verdict — has already spent two months in pre-trial detention, therefore already effectively serving the sentence.

A recording of his antisemitic stunt was posted on an anti-Jewish Telegram channel. But the court said there wasn’t enough evidence to actually convict him of distributing the racist image.

Wilson has long proclaimed his innocence, saying he was in Amsterdam for a weekend getaway with his girlfriend and daughter, but didn’t even know where the museum was.

Prosecutors have said Wilson is a prominent member of the Goyim Defense League, a neo-Nazi group.

It’s not his first run-in with the law, either.

In the US, he faces charges of assault and yelling homophobic slurs at a neighbor. And Polish authorities are still investigating whether Wilson stood in front of the Auschwitz concentration camp with a sign printed with antisemitic slogans.

The phrase Wilson projected was a reference to a theory pushed by Holocaust deniers that claims Frank’s journal is fake because several pages found among her papers were written in ballpoint pen.

The pages, found in the 1980s, were accidentally left in the diary in the 1960s, according to researchers. But conspiracy theorists say they prove the diary is fake because the ballpoint pen did not exist in the Netherlands in the 1940s.

Frank — who spent more than two years hiding with her family in the 17th century canal house — kept a diary throughout her crucible, which ended when the Gestapo arrested her family in the summer of 1944.

Her father, Otto, was the only one to survive the German death camps to which they were sent.

He published his daughter’s diary in 1947, fulfilling the 16-year-old’s lifelong dream of being a writer.

With Post wires