The ‘Nazi grandmother’ who fled to avoid jail in 2018 for denying the Holocaust has died aged 96 after claiming Auschwitz was just a ‘labor camp’.
Ursula Haverbeck died on Wednesday, according to tributes posted on X/Twitter by right-wing extremists and later broadcast by German news channel N-TV.
A post by the president of the far-right party Die Heimat, Frank Franz, 45, said: “Today we learned about his death from his lawyer.”
There has yet been no official confirmation from Haverbeck’s family or attorney.
Before his sudden death, Haverbeck had achieved chilling martyr status in neo-Nazi circles after publicly denying the murder of millions of Jews during Adolf Hitler’s reign.
The elderly woman had been jailed four times in the past five years for denying the Holocaust, a criminal offense in Germany.
Haverbeck was locked up in 2017 and late 2020, and a Berlin judge convicted her once again in April 2022 after she again publicly denied the Holocaust.
She believed that Auschwitz was a “labor camp” without gas chambers and, in an NDR television interview, denied that there was any mass extermination of people there.
Haverbeck, pictured in court on Nov. 17, 2020, refused to rescind her Holocaust denials. He reportedly died on Wednesday at age 96.
Haverbeck briefly fled from police in May 2018 after refusing to report to Verden prison.
Before his death, Haverbeck had achieved chilling martyr status in neo-Nazi circles after publicly denying the murder of millions of Jews during Adolf Hitler’s reign.
He also appeared on television to declare that “the Holocaust is the biggest and most sustainable lie in history.”
In Germany, anyone who publicly denies, supports or minimizes the extermination of Jews during Adolf Hitler’s regime can be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison.
It is estimated that more than six million people, including Jews, homosexuals, Roma, disabled people and other persecuted minorities, were murdered during the Holocaust.
Around 1.1 million people, most of them European Jews, were murdered between 1940 and 1945 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp before its liberation.
The judge repeatedly rejected his appeals to convert his prison sentence to fines on the grounds that he showed no remorse or any sign of changing his mind.
He said at the time: “You are not a Holocaust researcher, you are a Holocaust denier and what you are spreading is not knowledge, it is poison.”
‘There’s nothing stopping you. We will have no impact on you with words.’
The train tracks where hundreds of thousands of people arrived to be taken to the gas chambers inside the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz Birkenau.
The site is now used to remember the Holocaust.
Countless prisoners died of starvation in concentration camps.
Haverbeck failed to show up at Verden prison in western Germany in May 2018, sparking a week-long police search, but officers eventually found her after she returned home.
Most recently, in June of this year, Haverbeck was sentenced to one year and four months in prison without parole for incitement.
He had to serve this sentence in the Bielefeld-Senne prison, Germany.
After marrying former SS officer Werner Georg Haverbeck in 1970, Haverbeck spent decades running a “Holocaust research center” that published Holocaust-denying and anti-Semitic material.
It was finally closed in 2008.
After that, Haverbeck continued to make public appearances to deny the Holocaust, despite condemnations in states across Germany.
It once prompted a magistrate to declare: “It is deplorable that this woman, who is still so active given her age, should use her energy to spread such lurid nonsense.”
WHAT WAS THE AUSCHWITZ CONCENTRATION CAMP?
Auschwitz was a concentration and extermination camp used by the Nazis during World War II.
The camp, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland, was made up of three main sites.
Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a combined concentration and extermination camp, and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp, with 45 other satellite sites.
Auschwitz was an extermination camp used by the Nazis in Poland to murder more than 1.1 million Jews.
Birkenau became an important part of the Nazis’ “Final Solution”, where they attempted to rid Europe of the Jews.
An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom at least 1.1 million died, of whom around 90 percent were Jews.
Since 1947 it has functioned as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which in 1979 was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Since 1947 it has functioned as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which in 1979 was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.