Hamburg: An infamous 95-year-old Holocaust denier has been ordered to stand trial in Germany on charges of incitement, authorities announced on Friday.
Ursula Haverbeck was sentenced to 10 months in jail in November 2015 for denying that the Nazi German regime systematically murdered people at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
She has appealed that sentence and will go back to trial over the charges beginning next Friday in a district court in Hamburg.
Haverbeck made her comments during the 2015 trial of former Nazi SS member Oskar Groning, a guard and administrator at Auschwitz. Groning, who died in 2018, was convicted of accessory to murder in the deaths of 3,00,000 people.
She claimed in a television interview with regional public broadcaster NDR that the Nazis did not use Auschwitz as an extermination camp. She allegedly also claimed to journalists covering Groning’s trial that Auschwitz was only a labour camp.
At least 1.1 million people were murdered by the Nazis at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex.
Haverbeck is popular with the far-right fringe in Germany. She has repeatedly faced court proceedings over her comments in Germany, where hate speech and Holocaust denial are prohibited under law.
She was criminally convicted and fined in 2004. She served two years in prison in western Germany for Holocaust denial.
In 2022, she was again sentenced to one year in prison without probation by a Berlin court for incitement to hatred, in a judgement that is now final.
–IANS/DPA
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