Germany: Wife of WWII-era Nazi has failed to show up for prison after conviction for inciting hatred
An infamous German Holocaust denier, 89-year-old Ursula Haverbeck, was sentenced last year to two years in prison for inciting hatred. She has yet to set foot in jail.
Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA )reported on 7 May that federal prosecutors have announced that the deadline by which the Holocaust denier was to turn herself in to the authorities has now expired. Apparently an arrest warrant will now be issued for the right-wing extremist.
German courts have convicted Haverbeck of inciting hatred more than once. Her two-year prison sentence, which she was meant to have begun serving last Wednesday, was handed down against her in August 2017 by a court in the Lower Saxon city of Verden.
At the beginning of this year her appeal of that verdict failed, which means it has taken effect. Haverbeck has appealed several other verdicts sentencing her to prison and they are in various phases of processing.
The fact that the infamous Holocaust denier did not turn herself in to the prison in Bielefeld by the deadline means “necessary” measures will have to be taken, prosecutors said on 7 May without further elaboration. According to German law the issuing of an arrest warrant should now follow.
Haverbeck is a big player on the ultra-right scene and has long denied that the Nazis committed genocide against European Jews during the Second World War. She has frequently called the Auschwitz extermination camp a “labor camp”.
Her husband, Werner Georg Haverbeck, was in the leadership of the Nazi Party (the NSDAP) during the war for a certain time. She also recently announced that she intends to run as a candidate for the neo-Nazi party Die Rechte (The Right) in next year’s elections to the European Parliament.
The Nazis and their supporters during the Second World War murdered six million Jewish people, most of them from Europe, as part of their so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. It is a felony in Germany to deny the Holocaust.
