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, pictured in court on November 17, 2020, refused to retract her Holocaust denials. She reportedly died on Wednesday at the age of 96
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.”