From the Telegraph / Yahoo!News:
"The heiress whose family profited from the Nazis... and is now marching against Israel
Many would say the pro-Palestine movement is already filled to the brim with contradictions – but then steps forward an Austrian multi-millionaire heiress whose family made millions off the back of the Holocaust and who is now joining the latest “freedom flotilla” to Gaza.
“I decided to join the flotilla because I wanted to support the effort to end this genocide,” said Marlene Engelhorn, 33, in one Instagram post.
Engelhorn, who inherited some £21m in 2022, is a descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn, who founded the chemical giant BASF. In the 1920s, BASF merged with another German company, IG Farben, which later supplied Zyklon B to the Nazis. This poisonous gas was used to kill an estimated one million people, most of them Jews, at Auschwitz and other death camps.
The conglomerate also forcibly took over Jewish-owned competitors, exploited slave labourers and constructed an Auschwitz sub camp. After the war, the company was broken up for its central role in the genocide and BASF returned to Engelhorn’s family.
Marlene Engelhorn... has pledged to give away 90 per cent of her money to the 50 people who impress her most with their causes and the Gaza flotilla is her latest cause.
But some have questioned whether she has paused to contemplate the optics of someone with her family’s background going on the attack against the only Jewish state which has been fighting an existential war of survival.
“The falsehoods about me have already begun to spread,” she says on her Instagram page. “Yes it is true that my family profited from the Nazi regime – and I am deeply ashamed of that. But it is a lie that they invented and sold Zyklon B. They are using lies about my family because they have nothing real to say about me. Here is my message to all Israeli propaganda: I live now. I act now, and I want to break the cycle of violence and genocide.”...
Austrian social worker and family therapist Connier Kerman has coined the phrase “descendant fragility” to describe those who are descended from people who aided the Nazis and who instantly attack anyone who mentions it. How much worse if your family is as infamous as Engelhorn’s?
Austrian sociologist Prof Karin Stögner – one of the world’s leading scholars of anti-Semitism – suggests that Engelhorn is engaged in “guilt-deflecting” behaviour, in her attacks on Israel.
Israeli Holocaust survivor Bilha Haim, whose grandson Yotan Haim was kidnapped and killed in Gaza, says that a true woman of compassion would also be demanding the release of the hostages.
“I’m a woman of peace. I oppose the war, I oppose starvation, but after seeing the images of the hostages [starved by Hamas] I can no longer stay silent,” says Haim, who lives in Israel’s Southern District. “First and foremost, she should be calling for the release of the hostages. Why hasn’t anyone sailed to support the hostages and called for their rescue?
“I tried not to look at the photo of Eyvatar David [the emaciated Israeli hostage filmed digging his own grave], it’s too painful. It brings back memories of my own childhood. I had a respiratory attack after seeing those images – they look like Holocaust survivors.”
“If she [Engelhorn] wants to meet me I will talk to her. I want to ask her what does she see when she looks at me?”
Ms Engelhorn has been approached for comment."
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