District Court in Hamburg Ruling - Trial commences for 95-year-old accused of Holocaust denial.
Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck faces charges for incitement again in Hamburg court. Haverbeck, a well-known figure in right-wing communities, was first sentenced to ten months in prison without probation by the Hamburg District Court on 12th November 2015. She challenged this verdict, and the case is now with the Regional Court, almost nine years later. On the first day of the trial, she expressed her intention to argue against the charges.
The Hamburg Public Prosecutor's Office claims that Haverbeck, originating from North Rhine-Westphalia, incited in two instances. Supposedly, during a conversation with journalists following the Lüneburg trial against ex-SS member Oskar Gröning on 21st April 2015, she claimed that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp but rather a labor camp. Furthermore, in a televised interview with NDR's "Panorama," she insisted that no mass murder occurred there.
Haverbeck had previously been convicted in 2004 and was fined. Her most recent sentence was in prison without probation in Bielefeld (NRW) for denying the Holocaust. A Berlin court convicted her in 2022, meting out a one-year prison sentence without probation for incitement. This judgment is legally valid. Historians estimate that the Nazis murdered at least 1.1 million people in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Haverbeck's controversial views on the Holocaust have brought her before the criminal courts for two decades now.
