Verdict against 93-year-old: Holocaust denier should be in prison for one year

Judgment against 93-year-olds
Holocaust denier sentenced to one year in prison

Ursula Haverbeck has already been in prison for two and a half years because she repeatedly publicly denies the Holocaust. The Berlin Regional Court is now dealing with two appeals and has decided that the 93-year-old should go back to prison.

In the appeal process against the notorious Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck before the Berlin district court, the 93-year-old was sentenced to one year in prison. The accused denied and denied the Holocaust, the court justified its verdict. The trial was about Haverbeck’s appeals against two previous prison sentences for hate speech from 2017 and 2020.

Both procedures were merged into an appeal process at the district court. “You are not a Holocaust researcher, you are a Holocaust denier,” said the presiding judge in her verdict. Haverbeck said he was “miles away from the historical truth” and “damages the memories of millions of people who were murdered”.

Haverbeck was sentenced to six months in prison by the Tiergarten district court in 2017 because she was said to have repeatedly denied the Holocaust at a public event in a Berlin restaurant the year before. In 2020, the court sentenced Haverbeck to one year in prison for allegedly denying the Holocaust in an interview published on the Internet in 2018.

Words have no effect on Haverbeck

The 93-year-old spoke “in her own name” in both acts. “That was her own conviction,” said the judge. The chamber asked itself whether it was really necessary to sentence a 93-year-old to imprisonment. But the decision was “without alternative”. A suspended sentence was also out of the question. “They are unstoppable,” said the presiding judge. “We won’t do anything to you with words.”

In the appeal process that began in mid-March, several witnesses were heard and videos were shown that confirmed the two facts for which Haverbeck was convicted. She had also been sentenced elsewhere in Germany and was imprisoned in Bielefeld for two and a half years between 2018 and 2020. The Federal Constitutional Court had previously dismissed a constitutional complaint.

In the Berlin appeal process, the public prosecutor’s office demanded a prison sentence of one year and four months, with four months of the total sentence being considered to have already been served for legal reasons. The defense pleaded for an acquittal or, if convicted, for a fine or suspended sentence.

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