Opposition to Jews and their culture. - Nonagenarian to face court over Holocaust negation claims.
Almost a decade has passed since a court ruling on inciting hatred prompted Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck from Freitag to appear in court once more in Hamburg on June 13 at 1 p.m. Back in 2015, the Hamburg District Court sentenced her to ten months in prison with no probation. Apparently, she wasn't satisfied with this verdict and decided to appeal.
The accuser now accuses Haverbeck of incitement to hatred in two separate incidents. Her court case is scheduled before a petty criminal court at the Hamburg Regional Court on June 12 and 26.
Besides being a well-known figure in the right-wing circles, Haverbeck is believed to have made some controversial remarks to journalists on the sidelines of the Lüneburg trial against former SS man Oskar Gröning on April 21, 2015. According to her, Auschwitz wasn't an extermination camp, but rather a labor one. Additionally, she claimed in a NDR magazine "Panorama" TV interview that no mass murder of people occurred there.
The courts have struggled with Haverbeck's statements for many years. Back in 2004, she faced her first conviction and received a fine. More recently, several probation-free sentences have been handed down. For her denial of the Holocaust, Haverbeck spent more than two years in prison in Bielefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2022, a Berlin court slapped her with another yearlong sentence without probation for inciting hatred. That verdict stands as final. Historians put the number of victims in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp alone at least 1.1 million.
Previous hearing dates had to be rescheduled because of various reasons. As the Regional Court explains: "The unduly long duration of the proceedings now is the result of several factors, unfortunately coinciding and causing considerable delays."
