In one of history’s most bitter ironies, Marlene Engelhorn, a 33-year-old Austrian-German multimillionaire heiress whose family fortune was built on Nazi genocide, has joined a Gaza-bound flotilla to accuse Israel of the very crime her ancestors helped perpetrate against the Jewish people.
Marlene Engelhorn is the great-great-granddaughter of Friedrich Engelhorn, founder of BASF, the German chemical giant that during World War II became part of the infamous IG Farben conglomerate. This industrial behemoth played a central role in the Holocaust, manufacturing Zyklon B—the cyanide-based poison gas used to murder approximately one million Jews in Nazi extermination camps, primarily at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The Engelhorn family maintained control of their chemical empire for decades, only selling their stake in the mid-1990s for approximately $4.2 billion. When Marlene’s grandmother died in 2021, she inherited $27.1 million from this tainted fortune—wealth she herself has acknowledged was “accumulated long before I was born, off the labor of others.”
Now, this heiress to Nazi profits has positioned herself as a champion of Palestinian rights, joining what organizers call a “Peace Flotilla” to Gaza. In her public statements, Engelhorn declared: “I am against genocide, apartheid, illegal occupation, and for a free Palestine.”
The flotilla’s organizers have eagerly embraced her participation, with the Global Movement for Gaza proclaiming they are “very glad Marlene Engelhorn is on the right side of history.” The irony of this statement is staggering—the descendant of a family that literally profited from actual genocide is now being celebrated for accusing the Jewish state of the same crime.
To understand the profound inappropriateness of Engelhorn’s accusations, one must examine what actual genocide entailed. IG Farben, the conglomerate that enriched the Engelhorn family, didn’t just manufacture poison gas. The company:
- Forcibly “Aryanized” Jewish-owned competitors
- Exploited vast numbers of forced laborers
- Constructed Auschwitz III–Monowitz, a sub-camp of Auschwitz
- Produced 5.8 tons of Zyklon B—enough to kill an estimated 1.8 million people
During the Holocaust, approximately 36% of the world’s Jewish population were systematically murdered. Over 60% of European Jews were exterminated. Twelve IG Farben executives were imprisoned after the war for crimes against humanity, and Allied forces seized the company’s assets.
Unlike the systematic extermination that enriched Engelhorn’s family, the situation in Gaza presents vastly different statistics. According to available data:
- Gaza’s population has grown from approximately 80,000-100,000 in 1948 to over 2 million today
- Even by Hamas’s own figures, less than 3% of Gaza’s population has been affected by the current conflict
- This contrasts starkly with actual genocides: 70-75% of Tutsis were murdered in Rwanda, and 70-75% of Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire
The term “genocide” was coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, specifically in response to the Holocaust. The systematic murder of six million Jews created the legal framework that defines this ultimate crime. For someone whose family fortune was built on facilitating this very genocide, to now apply the same term to Israel’s defensive actions represents a profound historical inversion.
Adding another layer to this story, Engelhorn has gained attention for her activism, calling for higher taxes on the wealthy. She founded a lobbying group called “Tax Me Now” and attempted to convince Austria to impose a 90% inheritance tax on her windfall. When Austria refused (having no inheritance tax), she voluntarily redistributed 90% of her inheritance to 50 individuals she deemed deserving.
Yet this apparent social consciousness seems blind to the historical weight of her accusations against Israel. How does someone whose wealth stems directly from the Nazi machinery of death now accuse the Jewish state—established as a refuge for Holocaust survivors—of genocide?
Critics across Jewish and Israeli circles have called Engelhorn’s participation in the Gaza flotilla historically tone-deaf and deeply offensive. As one Israeli historian noted: “How does someone whose family profited from actual genocide now brand Israel—the Jewish state—with the very same terms used to describe Nazi crimes?”
The flotilla, intercepted by the Israeli Navy while attempting to breach the legal blockade of Gaza, represents more than just another anti-Israel protest. In Engelhorn’s participation, it embodies a profound moral blindness—the descendant of Nazi collaborators positioning herself as a moral authority on genocide while accusing the survivors’ state of the very crimes that enriched her family.
While many are aghast at the audacity of Englehorn’s actions, others praise her. She was awarded the Human Act Award for 2022 for “her incredible and relentless approach to working towards wealth taxes in German-speaking Europe.” The award was launched in response to the “UN’s 2020 call for a Decade of Action toward the 17 Sustainable Development Goals to honor individuals and organizations making extraordinary strides toward a more just and sustainable world”. Other recipients include anti-Israel activists Greta Thunberg, Tim Whyte, Sikandar Siddique, and the Al-Haq organization, a leader in anti-Israel “lawfare” and BDS campaigns, also received the award. Al-Haq’s General Director, Shawan Jabarin, has been linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terrorist organization by the US, EU, Canada, and Israel.
Marlene Engelhorn’s journey from inheriting Nazi-tainted wealth to accusing Israel of genocide represents one of history’s most perverse ironies. While she has shown awareness that her fortune was “unjustly inherited,” she appears incapable of recognizing the historical obscenity of her current accusations.
The Jewish people, who suffered the systematic genocide that created the legal definition of the term and enriched the Engelhorn family, now find themselves accused of the same crime by the beneficiary of those very atrocities. It is a moral inversion so complete that it defies rational explanation—unless one understands it as yet another chapter in the long history of antisemitism, now cloaked in the language of human rights activism.
The real tragedy is not just Engelhorn’s personal moral blindness, but that her accusations contribute to the dangerous erosion of the term “genocide”—cheapening the memory of those who actually suffered and died under the Nazi regime that enriched her family, including the million Jews murdered by the very poison gas her ancestors helped produce.
