Procedures are being followed. - Trial for Holocaust denial begins for 95-year-old Haverbeck.
Ursula Haverbeck, a well-known Holocaust denier, is set to appear in court in Hamburg starting Friday at 1 p.m. The 95-year-old resident of North Rhine-Westphalia was initially sentenced to ten months in prison without parole by a local court in 2015, but has since appealed the decision. She now stands accused of inciting hatred in two separate instances by the prosecution at the regional court.
Haverbeck allegedly made her incendiary remarks in April 2015, during the trial of former SS member Oskar Gröning in Lüneburg. According to the indictment, she declared Auschwitz to be a labor camp rather than an extermination facility, and even went so far as to deny the occurrence of mass murders at the site in a TV interview with NDR's "Panorama" program.
Haverbeck's historically inaccurate claims have led to legal repercussions in the past. She was first convicted in 2004 and fined. Since then, courts have levied sentences without the option for parole. Haverbeck had spent over two years in prison in Bielefeld for her Holocaust denial. According to estimates by historians, the Nazis killed at least one million, one hundred thousand people in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp alone.
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The processes of challenging Holocaust denial have a long history in Germany, as evidenced by Ursula Haverbeck's latest trial in Hamburg. Despite her previous conviction and imprisonment in 2004, Haverbeck continues to question the historical truths about Auschwitz, claiming it to be a labor camp and denying mass murders, which sparked new legal actions against her. These extremist views, even when expressed by a senior citizen like Haverbeck, are not tolerated by local courts, reflecting the nation's commitment to uphold historical accuracy and combat hatred.
