‘Nazi grandma’ who went on the run to avoid jail in 2018 for Holocaust denial dies aged 96: German pensioner claimed Auschwitz was only a ‘labour camp’

The ‘Nazi grandma’ who went on the run to avoid jail in 2018 for Holocaust denial has died aged 96 after claiming Auschwitz was only a ‘labour camp’.

Ursula Haverbeck passed away on Wednesday, according to tributes posted to X/Twitter by right-wing extremists and then aired on German news channel N-TV.

One post, from the chairman of the right-wing extremist party Die Heimat, Frank Franz, 45, read: ‘We learned of her death today from her lawyer’. 

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

Before her sudden death, Haverbeck had achieved a chilling martyr status in neo-Nazi circles after having publicly denied 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 offence in Germany. 

Haverbeck was locked up in 2017 and in late 2020, with a Berlin judge convicting her once more in April 2022 after she again denied the Holocaust in public. 

She believed Auschwitz was a ‘labour camp’ with no gas chambers, and in an NDR television interview, she denied that there was any mass extermination of people there.

Haverbeck briefly ran from cops in May 2018 after refusing to show up to prison in Verden

Before her death, Haverbeck had achieved a chilling martyr status in neo-Nazi circles after having publicly denied 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 sustainable lie in history’. 

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.

It is estimated that more than six million people, including Jews, gays, Romany, the disabled and other persecuted minorities, were killed during the Holocaust.

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

The judge repeatedly rejected her appeals to convert her prison term to fines on the grounds that she showed no remorse, nor any sign of changing her views.

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

‘There’s nothing that will stop you. We won’t have any impact on you with words.’

The railway tracks where hundred thousands of people arrived to be directed to the gas chambers inside the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz Birkenau

The site is now used to remember the Holocaust

Countless prisoners were starved to death at concentration camps

Haverbeck failed to turn up to prison in Verden, western Germany in May 2018, prompting a week-long police hunt, but cops finally found her after she returned home.    

Most recently, in June of this year, Haverbeck was handed a prison sentence of one year and four months without parole for incitement. 

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

After marrying former SS official Werner Georg Haverbeck in 1970, Haverbeck spent decades in charge of a ‘Holocaust research centre’ which published antisemitic and Holocaust-denying material.

It was finally shut down in 2008.

After that, Haverbeck continued to make public appearances to deny the Holocaust – despite convictions in states across Germany.

She once prompted a magistrate to declare: ‘It is deplorable that this woman, who is still so active given her age, uses her energy to spread such hair-raising nonsense.’

WHAT WAS THE AUSCHWITZ CONCENTRATION CAMP?

Auschwitz was a concentration and extermination camp used by the Nazis during World War Two.

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 labour camp, with a further 45 satellite sites.

Auschwitz was an extermination camp used by the Nazis in Poland to murder more than 1.1 million Jews

Birkenau became a major part of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’, where they sought to rid Europe of Jews.  

An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom at least 1.1 million died – around 90 percent of which were Jews. 

Since 1947, it has operated as Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which in 1979 was named a World Heritage Site by Unesco. 

Since 1947, it has operated as Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which in 1979 was named a World Heritage Site by Unesco