Hamburg: 95-year-old Holocaust denier sentenced to one year in prison | NDR.de – News

Status: 26.06.2024 20:04

95-year-old Ursula Haverbeck denies that mass murders took place in Auschwitz. Amidst tumult, the Hamburg district court has now announced the verdict for the Holocaust denier.

Haverbeck was sentenced to one year and four months in prison for two cases of incitement to hatred. She is to serve one year of this sentence. Four months are considered to have already been served because the proceedings were delayed for several years.

Unrest in the courtroom when the verdict is announced

Haverbeck, who is popular in right-wing extremist circles, was sentenced to ten months in prison without parole by the district court in Hamburg in 2015. She appealed against this. However, the trial did not take place until nine years later. The current verdict comes at a time “when anti-Semitism is on the rise again in Germany,” said the presiding judge. These words caused unrest in the audience. Around 100 of Haverbeck’s supporters had come. Some jumped up in outrage, many cursed the rule of law, some demonstratively left the hall.

Haverbeck had portrayed herself as a victim. As a woman who had been telling the truth for decades and was being persecuted by the state for it. The judge put the picture straight: the 95-year-old was not a victim, but a perpetrator. “You have grown as old as you are. Thousands of children in Auschwitz were not allowed to do that,” said the judge.

Haverbeck denied mass extermination in Auschwitz

Haverbeck had on 21 April 2015 on the sidelines of the During the Lüneburg trial of the former SS man Oskar Gröning, she told journalists that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but a labor camp. Despite many previous convictions, she also denied in a television interview with the NDR magazine “Panorama” that there was any mass extermination of people there.