Meet the Zyklon B heiress who is sailing to Gaza

Sometimes something so perfect happens you find yourself Googling furiously to make sure it’s really true. The news that one Marlene Engelhorn from Austria is joining the next flotilla to Gaza is one such story. For Ms Engelhorn is an heiress of a German industrial dynasty that profited from the production of Zyklon B, the cyanide that was used to gas and slaughter millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Her family profited from the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people and now she rages against the Jewish State – who was it who said history doesn’t repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes?

Ms Engelhorn inherited $27.1million from her family’s coffers. And some of that generational wealth has pretty disgusting origins. She is a descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn, who founded the German chemicals giant, BASF. In the 1920s, BASF merged with IG Farben. Some readers may have heard of that latter chemical conglomerate – its name lives in infamy as the producer of the poisonous gas the Nazis used to try to wipe the Jews from the face of the Earth. When her grandmother died in 2022, Ms Engelhorn got millions of Euros from this dynasty with a dark history.

And now she keeps herself busy by pontificating about the Jewish State. She’s been a key figure in Europe’s anti-Israel protests and next month she’ll set sail on the latest watery virtue-signal headed to Gaza to expose Israel’s ‘genocide’. Hen Mazzig put it best: so this is a ‘white, privileged, nepo baby’ whose family wealth comes in part from Nazi Germany’s ‘mass murder of Jews’ and she is ‘also anti-Israel’? ‘I did not see that coming’, he quipped, with excellent sarcasm.

Look, I am not for one minute suggesting Ms Engelhorn inherited her ancestors’ Nazi tendencies as well as their cash. And she is far from the first privileged white lady, or even the first nepo baby, to wang on morning, noon and night about the wickedness of Israel. The ‘pro-Palestine’ movement is lousy with aristocrats and leftists from Old Money and the overeducated middle classes who believe Israel is committing genocide as fervently as they believe you can have a todger and be a lesbian. Britain is especially bad. We’re overrun with Posh Twats for Palestine. Honestly, not since the days of Unity Mitford have I heard so many cut-glass voices hold forth on the ‘Jewish problem’.

And yet, you know what? If my forebears had been involved in the Nazis’ attempted annihilation of the Jews, I would simply sit out the Israel issue. I’d hold my tongue on the Jewish State. I certainly would not board a boat, Greta-style, and sail with other smug, preening, moneyed Europeans to point a bony finger of judgement at the Jewish nation for its ‘genocide, apartheid and illegal occupation’. Israel recently suffered a fascistic assault by a genocidal terror group devoted to slaughtering Jews, and now here comes a lady from Austria whose family profited from the Nazi regime’s industrialised slaughter of Jews? Think about the optics, Marlene.

It seems to me that for some in Europe, anti-Israel activism has become a kind of twisted source of personal and moral absolution. The thinking seems to be that if we can brand Israel as ‘genocidal’, as the authors of a ‘new holocaust’, then the historic sins of our own nations and our own ancestors might finally be washed away, or at least a little diminished. I’m not saying this is the case for Ms Engelhorn – that’s between her and her therapist, if she has one. But many young Europeans, most strikingly young Germans, appear to have found in Israelophobia a chance, at last, to unburden themselves of feelings of historical guilt. To say: ‘Look! Another nation is doing what we did! And would you believe it – it’s the Jewish nation!’

We are witnessing the sinister projection on to the world’s only Jewish nation of the crime Europe itself committed against the Jews. Behold the grim glee with which some Euro-leftists dream of ‘future Nurembergs’ to deal with Israel’s leaders. And the way some even gab excitedly about future genocide museums devoted to the horrors in Gaza. This is not anti-war activism – it is a sick effort, unconscious though it may be in many cases, to dislodge the unique status of the Holocaust by falsely and deliriously elevating this bloody war Hamas started to the same level. The end result is the moral demotion of the Jews and the moral absolution of Europe. The stealing from the Jews of the moral status they enjoyed as survivors of the greatest crime in history, and the rebranding of them as the perpetrators of a new crime of almost equal weight – all to the end of alleviating the moral hang-ups of privileged Europeans whose great-grandfathers shoved Jews into ovens.

I’m sure none of this is in Ms Engelhorn’s mind. I’m sure she believes she is doing good by raising awareness of Gaza’s suffering. But someone has to say it – for the heiress of rich folk who had links with the Nazis to now sail imperiously against the Jewish State feels fucked up. Don’t go, Marlene. Stay home. Enjoy your money.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy