Anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., apologized for suggesting unvaccinated Americans lives are harder than Anne Frank’s, a teenager who hid in a secret annex in Amsterdam for two years before she was captured and sent to a Nazi concentration camp where she later died.
“I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors,” Kennedy said in a tweet on Tuesday. “My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.”
Kennedy made the comment at an anti-vaccine mandate rally in Washington on Sunday.
“What we’re seeing today is what I call turnkey totalitarianism. They are putting in place all of these technological mechanisms for control we’ve never seen before. It’s been the ambition of every totalitarian state since the beginning of mankind to control every aspect of behavior, of conduct, of thought and to obliterate dissent. None of them have been able to do it. They didn’t have the technological capacity,” Kennedy said at the rally.
“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did. I visited in 1962 East Germany with my father and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped, so it was possible. Many died … but it was possible,” he added.
Kennedy received fierce criticism for his comments from a number of Jewish groups and his wife.
“.@RobertKennedyJr invoking Anne Frank’s memory and the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis as a comparison to the U.S. gov’t working to ensure the health of its citizens is deeply inaccurate, deeply offensive and deeply troubling,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote on Twitter.
“Exploiting of the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany — including children like Anne Frank — in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay,” the official Twitter account for the memorial said.
Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines distanced herself from her husband. She called the reference to Anne Frank “reprehensible and insensitive.”
“The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or anything. His opinions are not a reflection of my own,” she tweeted.
