Ursula Haverbeck, German far-right activist repeatedly convicted for Holocaust denial, dies at 96

BERLIN (AP) — Ursula Haverbeck, a prominent German far-right activist who accumulated a string of convictions for denying the Holocaust, has died. She was 96.

Haverbeck died on Wednesday, her lawyer Wolfram Nahrath told German news agency dpa on Thursday.

Haverbeck repeatedly asserted that Auschwitz was just a work camp. In fact, historians say at least 1.1 million Jews were murdered there by the Nazis.

She was first convicted and fined in 2004, and several further convictions for incitement followed — some of them carrying prison sentences. In one of those cases, she served more than two years in prison in the western city of Bielefeld between 2018 and 2020.

A small far-right party, The Right, chose her as as candidate for the 2019 European Parliament election.

Haverbeck was convicted in June for incitement and sentenced to a year and four months in prison by the Hamburg state court for comments about Auschwitz. She appealed against that verdict.