Ursula Haverbeck
Ursula HaverbeckReuters

German Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck, known as the "Nazi grandma", went on trial again on Friday in the German city of Hamburg for incitement to hatred, Deutsche Welle reported.

Haverbeck, 95, has repeatedly asserted that the Auschwitz death camp was just a work camp. She has been convicted several times but long avoided prison due to lengthy appeals. Germany's highest court threw out her case against the Verden conviction in August of 2018.

She has previously been imposed several fines and served at least 30 months for similar crimes.

In 2022, a Berlin court sentenced Haverbeck to 12 months in prison for denying that Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. The prison sentence for that conviction has not yet begun.

The current case concerns statements made by Haverbeck in April 2015 on the sidelines of a trial against the later convicted SS member Oskar Gröning at the Lüneburg District Court and in a television interview.

According to prosecutors, she told journalists that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp but a labor camp. In a television interview with the NDR "Panorama" program, she also denied that mass extermination had taken place there.

The judge asked where the defendant stood today with regard to her previous statements. Haverbeck then repeated one of the statements, according to DW.

The trial is scheduled to continue on June 12 and June 26.

German law makes it illegal to deny the genocide committed by Adolf Hitler’s regime, which in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in occupied Poland alone claimed some 1.1 million lives, mostly of European Jews.

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.