Ursula Haverbeck: 88-year-old Holocaust denier given six-month prison sentence

An 88-year-old woman, who has a string of previous convictions related to Holocaust denial, has been handed a six-month prison sentence for denying Nazi Germany’s mass murder of six million Jews.

Ursula Haverbeck, who has been branded the “Nazi grandma” by German press, was sentenced by a Berlin court on Monday for denying the holocast at an event in Berlin back in January 2016.

She claimed the Holocaust did not take place and there were no gas chambers at the Auschwitz Nazi death camp. Auschwitz is the largest mass murder site in human history and an estimated 1.1 million people died there.

Ms Haverbeck, who once declared the Holocaust was “the biggest and most sustainable lie in history” in a TV interview, has never spent time in prison before despite having several previous convictions for holocaust denial.

Denying the Holocaust is a criminal offence in Germany and carries a sentence of between three months to five years in prison.

Ms Haverbeck, who is a popular figure in far-right circles, was sentenced to two years in prison back in August for denying the Holocaust in an article written for right-wing magazine Stimme des Reiches (Voice of the Empire). She has not served her sentences because she has appealed all of the verdicts and the hearings are incomplete.

During the trial, Ms Haverbeck claimed Auschwitz was a labour camp rather than an extermination camp.

In September last year, a court in Detmold sentenced Ms Haverbeck to eight months in prison on sedition charges. The judge said she had a lack of "any kind of respect" and that she had made more offensive comments in the courtroom and ruled out the possibility of parole.

She was found guilty of penning a letter to Detmold's mayor, Rainer Heller, saying it was "clearly recognisable" that Auschwitz was merely a labor camp.

In November 2014, she went so far as to lodge a police complaint against the Central Council of Jews in Germany, accusing them of "persecution of innocent people".

Her late husband was Werner Georg Haverbeck was during the Nazi period temporarily engaged in the national leadership of the Nazi Party, founder, and director in 1933 of the German Imperial Federation of Nation and Homeland.

At the Detmold trial earlier this year, she distributed a pamphlet titled "Only the truth will set you free" in which she denies the fact six million Jews were exterminated across Europe under Adolf Hitler's dictatorship, to the judge, the prosecutor and even reporters.

Ms Haverbeck did the same at the trial of Oskar Groening, the former Auschwitz guard who was known as the so-called "accountant of Auschwitz" and stood accused of 300,000 counts of accessory to murder for his role during the Holocaust, back in 2015.

At the time, she prompted outrage for publishing a YouTube video condemning the trial and handing out leaflets entitled "Mass-murder in the concentration camp Auschwitz?"