Germany: 93-year-old Holocaust denier sent back to jail

The notorious neo-Nazi Ursula Haverbeck was sentenced to a 12-month prison sentence in Berlin on Friday for denying the murder of over a million Jews at the Auschwitz death camp.

The court rejected an appeal by the 93-year-old for convictions in 2017 and 2020 handed to her for repeated instances of Holocaust denial.

"You're not a Holocaust researcher, you're a Holocaust denier," the presiding judge said in the courtroom, adding "it's not knowledge you're spreading, it's poison."

Serial Holocaust denier

Haverbeck was sentenced to six months in prison in 2017 after repeatedly denying the historic facts of the Holocaust during an event in Berlin.

She then received a further 12-month-long prison sentence in 2020 for publishing an interview online in which she again made statements that denied the Holocaust.

The judge said Haverbeck's actions came from her own beliefs and that the decision to jail the 93-year-old had been necessary as there was no alternative.

"There's nothing that will stop you," the judge told Haverbeck. "We won't have any impact on you with words."

'Nazi Grandma'

Haverbeck repeatedly claimed that Auschwitz was "not historically proven" to be a death camp, claiming it was a labor camp instead. An estimated 1.1 million people were murdered at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; 90% of the victims were Jewish.

Dubbed "Nazi Grandma" by the German media, had also been convicted in other parts of Germany. She served two and a half years in prison in the western German city of Bielefeld in 2018.

She has also been handed numerous fines for her comments. Her lawyers in Friday's case had asked for her sentence to be lowered to fines or for her to be released.

This plea was rejected and future changes to the sentence are no longer possible.

ab/sms (AFP, AP)