Notorious German Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck, a well-known figure on the extremist far-right fringe of German politics who was repeatedly convicted in court for her comments, is dead. She was 96 years old.
Her lawyer, Wolfram Nahrath, confirmed to dpa that she died on Wednesday.
At the time of her death, Haverbeck had been appealing her most recent conviction for incitement to hatred for her comments denying the genocidal crimes of Germany’s Nazi regime during World War II.
A court in Hamburg sentenced her to 16 months in prison, but her lawyer appealed the sentence.
She previously served two years in prison for Holocaust denial, and had also been convicted and fined by German courts since 2004.
Haverbeck repeatedly claimed, including in a television interview and in courtrooms, that the Auschwitz concentration camp was not an extermination camp and that no mass murder took place there.
According to historians’ estimates and German government data, the Nazis murdered at least 1.1 million people in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex alone.
The prosecutions helped Haverbeck rise to prominence in Germany’s neo-Nazi scene, and she ran for the European Parliament in 2019 as the top candidate for the neo-Nazi extremist Die Rechte (“Right”) party.
