Pro-Palestinian activist accused of profiting from the extermination of Jews.

 

Marlene Engelhorn

The journalist Brendan O'Neill, once wrote for the magazine 'Living Marxism' (LM), that closed after being sued by ITN over a report written about the war in Bosnia. LM magazine which was the set up by members of the cultish Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), denied that genocide had taken place in Rwanda and Bosnia. After LM magazine closed, members of the group set up 'Spiked Online'. Spiked Online is generally pro-Israel, pro-Brexit and anti-climate change.

The U.N. stated recently that 1000 people in Gaza had been shot in the last two months by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), when they had tried to access food aid. Around 60,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the attack on Israel by members of Hamas on 7 October 2023, including many innocent women and children. We've also seen horrific photographs of starving and emaciated Palestinian children in Gaza. Although the International Criminal Court (ICC), have issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Spiked Online denies that genocide is taking place in Gaza.

In this article by Brendan O'Neill, he dismisses this as 'Israelophobia’. This article mainly attacks a pro-Palestinian Austrian activist called Marlene Engelhorn, who is disparagingly called the "Zyklon B Heiress." O'Neill tells us that Ms Engelhorn had inherited money ($27.1 million) from the family coffers that had been acquired partly through the production of Zyklon B gas that was used to gas Jews in the death camps during WWII. What O'Neill doesn't tell us, is that Ms Engelhorn seems to have given most of this money away. She has also campaigned for the Austrian government to increase taxes on the wealthy. Brendan O'Neill says that her family profited from the extermination of the Jewish people and finds it odd that now, "she rages against the Jewish state."

I can't see how Ms Engelhorn is anymore responsible for the extermination of European Jews than is the daughter of Amon Goth, who ran the death camp in the film Schindler's List. Many people profited from that war including English investors who had money invested with the German arms manufacturer Krupp. Ms Engelhorn is a descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn who founded the German chemicals giant BASF. In the 1920s, BASF merged with IG Farben that produced Zyklon B, which I believe was originally intended to be used for agricultural purposes as a pesticide.  

There were that many Jewish directors on the board of IG Farben that the Nazis called the firm the citadel of Jewish capitalism, but this didn't stop the Nazis doing business with the firm or the firm doing business with them. At the end of the war, some of the directors of IG Farben were put on trial at Nuremberg for war crimes.