Incitement in two cases
More than a year in prison for Holocaust denier Haverbeck
26.06.2024, 18:18
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The notorious Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck is sentenced to prison for incitement – 20 years after the first verdict against her. The now 95-year-old has already served two years in prison.
The Hamburg Regional Court has sentenced the notorious Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck to a total prison sentence of one year and four months for incitement. A Berlin verdict from 2022 in another trial will be included, said the presiding judge in the appeal proceedings. Four months are considered to have already been served because there were procedural delays of several years. The verdict is not yet final.
The public prosecutor’s office had accused the now 95-year-old of incitement to hatred in two cases. On April 21, 2015, Haverbeck, who lives in North Rhine-Westphalia, told journalists on the sidelines of the Lüneburg trial of 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 any 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.
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 sentence, but the trial did not take place until nine years later.
For years, criminal courts have had to deal with Haverbeck’s statements again and again. The senior citizen was convicted for the first time in 2004. She received a fine. Most recently, sentences were passed without parole. Haverbeck has already spent more than two years in prison for Holocaust denial. In 2022, she was again sentenced to one year in prison without parole by a Berlin court for incitement to hatred. She has not yet begun her sentence.