“The Holocaust is the biggest and most enduring lie in history” or “Adolf Hitler is not to be understood by the Holocaust he believed in or his alleged obsession with war, but only by a divine mission in the context of world history” – these are just two sentences from Ursula Haverbeck.
The woman, who was born in Winterscheid, Germany, in 1928, was repeatedly in court because of her Holocaust denial. She was sentenced several times to fines and prison sentences for sedition, sometimes without parole. Haverbeck has now died at the age of 96. Right-wing extremist circles had previously reported on social media that Haverbeck’s lawyer had informed them of her death.
Haverbeck grew up in Winterscheid, Hesse, her maiden name was Wetzel. According to her own statements, she spent several years in Sweden and Scotland. In 1970 she married the former SA and SS member Werner Georg Haverbeck, and they both founded the Holocaust denier association “Collegium Humanum,” which was banned in 2008.
Haverbeck repeatedly presented her historical revisionist theses in the media. She said in a television interview with NDR in 2015: “If we want to have a future that is humane and earth-appropriate, we cannot do it with lies.” She does not deny that there were concentration camps and that “bad things” happened there. But there were no gas chambers. In addition, the SS itself took strict action against members who murdered Jews.
In the interview, Haverbeck emphasized several times that the members of her generation also suffered terribly. However, this is rarely discussed because people only talk about the alleged Holocaust: “The terrible things that are said are only said with others in mind.”
Haverbeck’s statements are factually untenable. The mass extermination of six million European Jews during the Nazi era is considered one of the best documented events in recent history. Numerous contemporary witnesses, as well as countless documents from this time, show how Jews were murdered in the gas chambers of the concentration camps.
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