German grandmother, 87, is sentenced to ten months in jail for denying the Holocaust and saying Auschwitz was 'just a labour camp'

Punishing holocaust denial just creates the impression that something is being covered up

A German grandmother aged 87 has been sentenced to ten months in jail for denying the Holocaust and saying Auschwitz was 'just a labour camp'. 

Ursula Haverbeck, who is a friend of Gudrun Burwitz - elderly daughter of Nazi S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler - was sentenced in a court in Hamburg for sedition over an interview she gave to a TV station denying that Jews were murdered in extermination camps.

In the interview with the ARD network she claimed the death camp of Auschwitz in Nazi occupied Poland, where at least 1.1 million people were murdered, was 'nothing more than a labour camp.'

Haverbeck has been sentenced several times in the past for her trenchant views supporting the Nazis.

During her defence she said that the Holocaust of six million Jews 'was the greatest and longest lived lie in history.'

Judge Björn Jönsson struggled to maintain his temper with the elderly Nazi after she said she shouldn't be punished for the crime again as she had already been fined twice and given a suspended sentence for previous Holocaust denials.

He said: 'I do not have to prove the Holocaust to you, same as I do not have to prove that the earth is round.

'It is futile to discuss facts with people like you. A thief who steals the same thing again and again is punished again and again.'

The prosecutor in the case stormed: 'It is regrettable that a woman who is still so vivid in her old age wastes her energy trying to spread such a hair-raising bullshit.'

SOURCE