Germany: 87-Yr-Old Grandmother Sentenced to Prison for Questioning Holocaust

A court in Detmold on Friday sentenced Ursula Haverbeck to eight months in jail on charges of sedition. The presiding judge ruled out the possibility of parole and said that Haverbeck had a lack of "any kind of respect" and that she had made more offensive comments in the courtroom.

Haverbeck is expected to appeal against the sentencing. In Germany, anyone who publicly denies, endorses or plays down the extermination of Jews during Adolf Hitler's regime can be sentenced to a maximum of five years in jail.

Haverbeck was found guilty of writing a letter to Detmold's mayor, Rainer Heller, saying it was "clearly recognizable" that Auschwitz was nothing more than a labor camp. She wrote her message at the time when the Detmold court was trying Reinhold Hanning, a former guard who served at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The 94-year-old was sentenced to five years in prison after the court found him guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 people, mostly Jews. Haverbeck spoke about Hanning's trial in her letter, alleging that the witnesses at the trial were set up to prove the existence of the concentration camp.