A notorious 95-year-old Holocaust denier has been ordered to stand trial in Germany on sedition charges, authorities announced Friday.
Ursula Haverbeck was sentenced to ten months in prison in November 2015 for denying that the Nazi German regime systematically murdered people in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
She has appealed this sentence and will stand trial again at a district court in Hamburg from next Friday.
Haverbeck made her comments during the 2015 trial of former Nazi SS member Oskar Gröning, a guard and administrator at Auschwitz. Gröning, who died in 2018, was convicted of complicity in murder in which 300,000 people died.
She claimed in a television interview with regional public broadcaster NDR that the Nazis did not use Auschwitz as an extermination camp. She also allegedly claimed to journalists who reported on the trial against Gröning that Auschwitz was only a labor camp.
At least 1.1 million people were murdered by the Nazis in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex.
Haverbeck is popular with the far-right fringe in Germany. She has faced repeated legal action over her comments in Germany, where hate speech and Holocaust denial are banned by law.
She was criminally convicted and fined in 2004. She spent two years in prison in West Germany for Holocaust denial.
In 2022, she was sentenced again by a Berlin court to one year in prison without probation for incitement to hatred, in a verdict that is now final.
