'Nazi grandma' convicted again for Holocaust denial
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95-year-old German notorious Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck waits for the start of her appeal proceedings at the district court in Hamburg, northern Germany, on June 7, 2024. Haverbeck was sentenced by the district court in 2015 to ten months in prison without parole, but she filed an appeal. The public prosecutor's office accuses the woman of incitement to hatred in two cases.
Photo by Markus Scholz / POOL / AFP
A notorious German pensioner known as the "Nazi grandma" who has been jailed several times for denying the Holocaust was sentenced to another 16 months at her latest trial on Wednesday.
A Hamburg court convicted Ursula Haverbeck, 95, of denying the Nazi genocide on several occasions, including in 2015 during the trial of a former Nazi camp guard.
In their sentencing, the judges took into account her previous convictions and the fact she had "also used the proceedings to further disseminate her views", a court spokeswoman told AFP.
Haverbeck repeated her remarks on the Holocaust several times at the trial.
Supporters of the pensioner showed up on Wednesday and repeatedly interrupted proceedings with heckling, the spokeswoman said.
Haverbeck was once head of a far-right training centre shut down in 2008 for spreading Nazi propaganda.
She has previously been sentenced on several occasions to jail for denying the Nazi genocide, once declaring on television that "the Holocaust is the biggest and most sustained lie in history".
Haverbeck was sentenced this time after losing an appeal over a conviction for comments allegedly made in 2015 during the trial of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening, who was convicted of being an accessory to murder.
Haverbeck said the Auschwitz concentration camp was just a labour camp and no mass murder had taken place there, according to prosecutors.
The proceedings were delayed several times due to the coronavirus pandemic and illness.
The sentencing also takes into account a previous conviction by a Berlin court in 2022 over statements made by Haverbeck in another interview and at an event.
It was not clear whether she will actually go to jail.
German law makes it illegal to deny the genocide committed by Adolf Hitler's regime, which in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in occupied Poland alone claimed some 1.1 million lives, mostly European Jews.
Holocaust denial and other forms of incitement to hatred carry up to five years in prison, while the use of Nazi symbols such as swastikas is also banned.
