A Hamburg court has sentenced a leading German Holocaust denier, 95-year-old Ursula Haverbeck, to one year and four months in prison for incitement to hatred. She claimed Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but a labour camp.
Haverbeck had made the claim to journalists in 2015 during the trial of former SS Oskar Gröning, better known as the “accountant of Auschwitz.”
The Hamburg court ruled that four months of the total sentence could be considered served due to lengthy procedural delays. Haverbeck had been sentenced in 2015 to ten years in prison. She had appealed and then had to wait nine years for Wednesday’s verdict.
Ursula Haverbeck has been in and out of courts for two decades. She was first convicted in 2004, when she was fined. She has already served more than two years in prison for denying the Holocaust.
Oskar Gröning, who died six years ago, was convicted by German courts of complicity in the deaths of 300,000 people at Auschwitz, and sentenced to four years in prison. He supervised the arrival of prisoners and counted the money collected from the victims.
