Ursula Haverbeck, a notorious Holocaust denier whom even a two-year prison spell failed to deter from making fallacious claims about the mass murders and other atrocities committed by the German Nazi regime, has died at the age of 96.

Her lawyer, Wolfram Nahrath, told a Hamburg court, where she was appealing a conviction for inciting hatred by denying the Nazis' genocidal crimes, that Haverbeck died on Wednesday.

Decades of convictions

Haverbeck, who was married for many years to a former member of the Nazi organizations SA and SS, was convicted several times since 2004 for her comments denying that the Holocaust — which she once called the "most tenacious lie of history" — ever took place.

She previously served two years in prison for Holocaust denial and was appealing another prison sentence of a year and four months handed down by the court in Hamburg when her death occurred.

Among her repeated claims, made on television and in courts, was that the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was not an extermination camp. German government records show that at least 1.1 million people were murdered there alone.

Her comments made her a favorite with far-right extremists, and she even ran for the European Parliament in 2019 as the top candidate for the neo-Nazi party Die Rechte ("The Right").

Germany is one of 17 European countries that, along with Israel and Canada, have laws listing Holocaust denial as a punishable offense.

tj/sms (dpa, epd) 

While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.