An
87-year-old woman has been sentenced to eight months after she claimed that
Jews were never exterminated in Auschwitz. Her criminal record includes two
fines and another sentence for sedition.
A court in Detmold on Friday sentenced Ursula Haverbeck to eight years
in jail on charges of sedition. The presiding judge ruled out the possibility
of parole and said that Haverbeck had a lack of “any kind of respect”
and that she had made more offensive comments in the courtroom.
Haverbeck is expected to appeal against the sentencing. In Germany,
anyone who publicly denies, endorses or plays down the extermination of Jews
during Adolf Hitler’s regime can be sentenced to a maximum of five years in
jail.
Haverbeck was found guilty of writing a letter to Detmold’s mayor,
Rainer Heller, saying it was “clearly recognizable” that Auschwitz
was nothing more than a labor camp. She wrote her message at the time when the
Detmold court was trying Reinhold Hanning, a former guard who served at the
Auschwitz concentration camp.
The 94-year-old was sentenced to five years in prison after the court
found him guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 people, mostly
Jews. Haverbeck spoke about Hanning’s trial in her letter, alleging that the
witnesses at the trial were set up to prove the existence of the concentration
camp.
Ursula Haverbeck is known for her right-wing extremist views. Several
courts have sentenced her and her punishments include two fines and another
suspended sedition sentence. She was on trial last year for saying that the
Holocaust was “the biggest and longest-lasting lie in history.”
