‘Nazi grandmother’ who went on the run in 2018 to avoid prison for Holocaust denial dies at 96: German retiree claimed Auschwitz was just a ‘labor camp’

The ‘Nazi grandmother’ who went on the run in 2018 to avoid prison for Holocaust denial has died aged 96 after claiming Auschwitz was just a ‘labor camp’.

Ursula Haverbeck died on Wednesday, according to a tribute that right-wing extremists posted on X/Twitter and was subsequently broadcast on the German news channel N-TV.

A message from the chairman of the right-wing extremist party Die Heimat, Frank Franz, 45, said: “We learned today from her lawyer that she has died.”

There has been no official confirmation yet from Haverbeck’s family or attorney.

Before her sudden death, Haverbeck had achieved the chilling status of a martyr in neo-Nazi circles after publicly denying the murder of millions of Jews during the reign of Adolf Hitler.

The elderly woman had been jailed four times in the past five years for Holocaust denial, a criminal offense in Germany.

Haverbeck was imprisoned in 2017 and late 2020, with a Berlin judge re-sentencing her in April 2022 after she publicly denied the Holocaust again.

She believed that Auschwitz was a “labor camp” without gas chambers, and in an NDR television interview she denied that any mass extermination of people took place there.

Haverbeck briefly fled from the police in May 2018 after refusing to appear at the prison in Verden

Before her death, Haverbeck had achieved the chilling status of a martyr in neo-Nazi circles after publicly denying the murder of millions of Jews during the reign of Adolf Hitler.

She had also appeared on television to declare that “the Holocaust is the biggest and most enduring lie in history.”

In Germany, anyone who publicly denies, endorses or downplays the extermination of Jews during Adolf Hitler’s regime can be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

It is estimated that more than six million people, including Jews, homosexuals, Roma, disabled people and other persecuted minorities, died during the Holocaust.

About 1.1 million people, most of them European Jews, were murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp between 1940 and 1945 before it was liberated.

The judge repeatedly rejected her appeal to commute her prison sentence to fines, on the grounds that she showed no remorse or any sign of change of heart.

He said at the time: ‘You are not a Holocaust researcher, you are a Holocaust denier and it is not knowledge you are spreading, it is poison.’

‘Nothing stops you. We will not have any influence over you with words.’

The railway lines where hundreds of thousands of people arrived to be led to the gas chambers in the former Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau

The site is now used to commemorate the Holocaust

Countless prisoners died of starvation in concentration camps

Haverbeck failed to show up at the prison in Verden, West Germany, in May 2018, prompting a week-long police hunt, but police eventually found her after she returned home.

Most recently, in June this year, Haverbeck was sentenced to one year and four months in prison without parole for sedition.

She would serve this sentence in Bielefeld-Senne prison, Germany.

After marrying former SS official Werner Georg Haverbeck in 1970, Haverbeck spent decades directing a “Holocaust Research Center” that published anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying material.

It was finally closed in 2008.

Afterwards, Haverbeck continued to make public appearances to deny the Holocaust – despite condemnations in states across Germany.

She once prompted a magistrate to declare: “It is deplorable that this woman, so active considering 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.

Located in Nazi-occupied Poland, the camp consisted of three main locations.

Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a combined concentration and extermination camp and Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp, with an additional 45 satellite locations.

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’, which sought 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 – about 90 percent of them Jews.

Since 1947, it has served as the state museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979.

Since 1947 it has functioned as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979