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At the end of the trial against Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck, the Berlin-Tiergarten district court judge quotes Oskar Gröning, the former SS man who was convicted in 2015 at the age of 94 for aiding and abetting the murder. in 300,000 cases. At the trial before the Lüneburg Regional Court, Holocaust survivors reported on the horror at Auschwitz. Groening also spoke of the gas chambers, the screaming and an SS man who threw a baby with all his might at a truck.
Ursula Haverbeck was among the spectators at Gröning’s 2015 trial. That hasn’t changed anything about their propaganda. The 92-year-old continues to question the murder of millions of Jews. At the time, on the sidelines of the trial, NDR reporters asked Gröning what he was giving to Holocaust deniers. Groening’s response: “They are hopelessly lost.” It is this phrase that the judge is now quoting in Berlin.
Ursula Haverbeck is also said to be “hopelessly lost.” The old woman does not listen to the judge’s sentence that day. On the first day of the trial she was still in the room. But the court has allowed her to stay away from the verdict. So he didn’t have to travel back to Berlin from North Rhine-Westphalia, where he lives. In any case, it is out of the question that the words have any effect on the notorious Holocaust denier.
In an interview with a YouTuber calling himself “Volkslehrer” that he posted in March 2018, Haverbeck downplayed and denied Nazi crimes. In the roughly 15-minute video, he called for “working to ensure that this lie, this burden of debt” that falls on the German people, is “lifted.” Haverbeck denies the industrially organized mass murder of six million Jews. Haverbeck says he never got an answer to the question “where the six million Jews were gassed.”
“I find it unbearable to have to listen to such statements,” says the judge in his verdict. “You are a mockery of the victims.” The court sentenced Haverbeck in absentia for sedition to one year in prison, without parole. The verdict is not yet legally binding.
This is not Haverbeck’s first conviction for sedition. The court also does not believe that the 92-year-old will change her behavior. “I’m afraid there is a risk of repetitions,” says the judge. But the purpose of punishment is not only to affect the individual, but also to punish misconduct. The court took Haverbeck’s old age and the sensitivity associated with the arrest as mitigation.
The prosecution had requested one year and three months in prison. Haverbeck sells the “Auschwitz lie” as truth and denies the historical fact of the Holocaust.
The defender portrays her as a victim
Defense attorney Wolfram Nahrath presented his client as a victim in his closing conference. Ursula Haverbeck was “a sensitive, sensitive and intelligent person.” Nahrath asks, “What should people like Frau Haverbeck be like?” People who risk prosecution if they express their convictions. These people are forced to remain silent. And that’s a situation that makes you sick.
Haverbeck was unable to deny anything that he did not acknowledge as fact due to “deep and well established misconception,” the defense attorney said. Nahrath urged the court to “show mercy.” “Isn’t there time to leave this old woman alone?” His client did not know that the “conversation” with the “village teacher” should be published. Therefore, you have not consented to the publication. Nahrath requested acquittal.
Ursula Haverbeck knew exactly what she was doing, the court concluded. The interview was not a private conversation with Nikolai Nerling, the self-proclaimed “teacher of the people.” He greeted the audience with “Hello friends”, mentioned that “many” would now watch his conversation, and Ursula Haverbeck also spoke to the camera. “The video was meant to be published,” says the judge, and Haverbeck was aware of that.
She wasn’t there, Haverbeck says.
Haverbeck’s claim that he only asked questions, the court exposes as a rhetorical device. From the context it can be seen that his statement that there was no evidence of the murder millions of times should mean that there was no systematic mass murder.
On the first day of the trial, Haverbeck had said that he could not recognize the Holocaust as fact because, although he was born during the Nazi era, he had not become an eyewitness to the crimes. She wasn’t there, he said.
“Personally, I have never seen the world from space,” says the judge, “but I know that the world is not flat.”
Note: In an earlier version of the text it was stated in the opening credits that Ursula Haverbeck was 94 years old. Haverbeck is 92 years old. We fixed the bug.
