A notorious German pensioner known as “Nazi Grandma” who has been jailed multiple times for denying the Holocaust was sentenced to an additional 16 months in prison on Wednesday in her latest trial.
A Hamburg court convicted 95-year-old Ursula Haverbeck of denying Nazi genocide on several occasions, including during the trial of a former Nazi camp guard in 2015.
In sentencing, judges took into account his previous convictions and the fact that he had “used the proceedings to further disseminate his views,” a court spokeswoman told AFP.
Haverbeck repeated his comments on the Holocaust several times during the trial.
The spokesperson said supporters of the pensioner came on Wednesday and repeatedly disrupted proceedings by creating a ruckus.
Haverbeck once headed a right-wing training centre that was shut down in 2008 for spreading Nazi propaganda.
He has previously been jailed several times for denying the Nazi genocide, once declaring on television that “the Holocaust is history’s greatest and most enduring lie.”
Haverbeck was sentenced this time because he lost an appeal over his conviction in 2015 for comments he allegedly made during the trial of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Gröning, who was convicted of being an accessory to the murder.
According to prosecutors, Haverbeck said that the Auschwitz concentration camp was only a labor camp and that no mass murder took place there.
The proceedings were delayed several times due to the coronavirus pandemic and illness.
The sentence also takes into account a previous conviction handed down by a Berlin court in 2022 for statements made by Haverbeck in another interview and at a programme.
It was unclear whether she would actually go to jail.
Under German law, it is illegal to deny the genocide committed by Adolf Hitler’s regime, which claimed the lives of some 1.1 million people, most of them European Jews, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in occupied Poland alone.
Denial of genocide and other forms of inciting hatred are punishable by up to five years in prison, while the use of Nazi symbols such as the swastika is also banned.
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