As the trial of infamous 95-year-old Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck in the northern German port city of Hamburg draws to a close, a verdict could be handed down on Wednesday.
Haverbeck, popular among right-wing extremists, was sentenced to 10 months in prison without probation in 2015 by the city court. She appealed, but the trial did not take place for nine years. She is accused of two counts of incitement to hatred.
According to the indictment, Haverbeck told journalists on April 21, 2015, on the sidelines of the trial of former SS member Oskar Gröning, that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but rather a labor camp.
She also denied in a television interview with the regional public broadcaster NDR that there was a mass extermination of people in Auschwitz.
Criminal courts have repeatedly had to deal with Haverbeck’s rulings over the past twenty years. She was first convicted in 2004 and fined.
Most recently, sentences were imposed without probation. Haverbeck has already served more than two years in prison for Holocaust denial.
Historians estimate that the Nazis murdered at least 1.1 million people in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp alone.
