Ursula Haverbeck, a notorious German Holocaust denier who came to be known as the “Nazi grandma”, has died at the age of 96, The Associated Press reported.
Her lawyer, Wolfram Nahrath, confirmed to the German news agency dpa on Thursday that Haverbeck passed away on Wednesday.
Haverbeck was notorious for her repeated false claims about Auschwitz, insisting it was merely a work camp and not a death camp where at least 1.1 million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis.
Throughout the years, Haverbeck was several times convicted for Holocaust denial, which is illegal in Germany.
Her first conviction came in 2004, resulting in a fine. Some of her later additional convictions included prison sentences.
Germany's highest court threw out her case against one conviction in August of 2018.
Haverbeck served more than two years in a prison in Bielefeld, a city in western Germany, between 2018 and 2020.
In 2022, a Berlin court sentenced Haverbeck to 12 months in prison for denying that Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust.
Earlier this year, Haverbeck was sentenced to another 16 months at her latest trial, in which she repeated her remarks on the Holocaust several times. She was sentenced after losing an appeal over a conviction for comments allegedly made in 2015 during the trial of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening, who was convicted of being an accessory to murder.
Holocaust denial and other forms of incitement to hatred against segments of the population carry up to five years in prison in Germany, while the use of Nazi symbols such as swastikas is also banned.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)