A Berlin court has sentenced serial Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck to six months in jail for denying the Nazis’ extermination of Jews. She has never spent time in prison despite several previous convictions.
The 88-year-old Ursula Haverbeck, who has several previous convictions all related to Holocaust denial, was on Monday found guilty of once again denying the mass murder of millions of Jews during the Nazi era in Germany, this time at an event in Berlin on January 30, 2016.
Haverbeck will also stand trial in the western town of Detmold again on November 23. She had appealed two verdicts by a Detmold court, handed down for incitement to hatred after she sent a letter to Detmold’s mayor and various media in which she refutes the genocide of Jews between 1941 and 1945.
She once said on television that the Holocaust was “the biggest and most sustainable lie in history.” German media have dubbed her the “Nazi grandma.”
Haverbeck and her late husband Werner Georg Haverbeck, who was an active NSDAP member in the run-up to and during the Second World War, founded a right-wing education centre called Collegium Humanum, which has been banned since 2008.
She has also filed charges against Germany’s Central Council of Jews, the country’s EJC affiliate, for “prosecuting innocent people.”
Under German law, incitement to hatred is a criminal offense often applied to individuals who deny or trivialize the Holocaust. It carries a sentence of between three months to five years in prison. Haverbeck has not served her sentences as she has appealed all of the verdicts, with hearings ongoing.
