The notorious 95-year-old Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck has appealed her conviction for incitement, a court spokeswoman in the northern German city of Hamburg told dpa.

Ms Haverbeck, a well-known figure in German far-right circles, was sentenced to one year and four months in prison by the Hamburg Regional Court in June.

The case will now go to the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court.

The charges against Haverbeck stem from comments she made during the 2015 criminal trial of former Nazi SS member Oskar Gröning, who served as a guard at Auschwitz.

Ms Haverbeck told reporters covering the trial that Auschwitz, where historians estimated the Nazis systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people, was only a labour camp, not an extermination camp.

In a television interview with the regional public broadcaster NDR, she made similar false claims.

The Hamburg court said in June that four months of Ms Haverbeck’s sentence would be considered already served because of long delays in bringing the case to trial.

The decision also encompassed a one-year prison term she received from a Berlin court for incitement to hatred in 2022.

Ms Haverbeck was originally sentenced to 10 months in prison without probation by the district court in Hamburg in 2015.

She appealed, but the trial did not take place until nine years later.

In recent decades, German courts have repeatedly had to deal with highly controversial statements made by Ms Haverbeck.

The elderly extremist was first convicted in 2004 and served more than two years in prison for Holocaust denial from 2018 to 2020. 

(dpa/NAN)