Germany More than a year in prison for German Holocaust denier
On Wednesday, the Hamburg District Court sentenced the notorious German Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck to a total prison sentence of one year and four months for incitement of the people.
26.06.2024, 17:08
SDA
A Berlin judgment from 2022 in another trial will be taken into account, the presiding judge said in the appeal proceedings. Four months are considered to have already been served because the proceedings had been delayed for several years. The verdict is not yet final.
The public prosecutor's office had accused the now 95-year-old of incitement of the people in two cases. Haverbeck, who lives in North Rhine-Westphalia, had told journalists on April 21, 2015 on the sidelines of the Lüneburg trial against former SS man Oskar Gröning that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but a labor camp.
In a television interview with the NDR magazine "Panorama", she also denied that there was a mass extermination of people there. According to estimates by historians, the Nazis murdered at least 1.1 million people in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp alone, most of them Jews.
Haverbeck, who is popular in right-wing extremist circles, was sentenced to ten months in prison without probation by the district court in Hamburg in 2015. She had lodged an appeal against this. However, the trial did not take place until nine years later.
For years, criminal courts have repeatedly had to deal with statements made by Haverbeck. The senior citizen was convicted for the first time in 2004. She received a fine. Most recently, sentences were handed down without probation. Haverbeck has already served more than two years in prison for Holocaust denial. In 2022, she was again sentenced to one year in prison without probation by a Berlin court for incitement to hatred. She has not yet served her sentence.
Holocaust denial is a criminal offense in Germany.
