Nazi heiress supports Palestinians

Eli David tweeted, “Meet Marlene Engelhorn, one of the major organizers of anti-Israel protests in Europe.

“Fun fact: Her wealth comes from her great-grandfather Friedrich Engelhorn, who made his fortune from producing Zyklon B, the gas used by the Nazis to murder Jews during the Holocaust.”

I did Nazi that coming.

The New York Times published a saccharine story about her last summer:

After six weekends of deliberating, a group of Austrian citizens this week decided how to divvy up the riches of the heiress Marlene Engelhorn, who is donating the bulk of her inheritance to charity in an attempt to challenge a system that allowed her to accumulate millions of euros.

The Guter Rat für Rückverteilung (“good council for redistribution” in German), a group of 50 residents in Austria advised by experts, chose 77 organizations that would receive money from Ms. Engelhorn’s fortune over the coming years.

Ms. Engelhorn, 32, made headlines this year when she turned to the public to help redistribute her wealth, challenging the lack of inheritance tax in her native Austria. In January, she sent invitations to 10,000 Austrian residents, asking them for help spending 25 million euros (about $26.8 million) of her fortune, which she inherited when her grandmother died. The research group Foresight selected 50 of those residents, from various backgrounds, to form the council.

She’s Austrian.

You know who else was Austrian? He bought a lot of Zyklon B from IG Farben, the company that made the money for “Ms. Engelhorn’s fortune.”

The NYT story did not mention Zyklon B and glossed over her connection to the infamous chemical company that produced it by referring only to BASF, a component of IG Farben:

The Engelhorn family’s multibillion-dollar fortune started with Friedrich Engelhorn, who in the 19th century founded BASF, one of the world’s largest chemical companies. Another family company, Boehringer Mannheim, which produced pharmaceuticals and medical diagnostic equipment, was sold to Roche for $11 billion in 1997.

Ms. Engelhorn grew up in a mansion in a chic part of Vienna and has long campaigned for tax policies that would redistribute inherited wealth and address structural economic inequality. Austria abolished its inheritance tax in 2008.

BASF became part of the I.G. Farben chemical industry conglomerate in Germany in 1925. After the war, allies spun off the various component companies in IG Farben, which revived the BASF name.

In its report on her giveaway, Fortune danced around Zyklon B and said, “Engelhorn’s approach is a dramatic example of the ways in which heirs of dynastic wealth are choosing a different path than previous generations. Her ancestor Friedrich Engelhorn left BASF in the late 19th century and invested his fortune in the predecessor to Boehringer Mannheim, which was bought by Swiss pharma giant Roche Holdings AG for $11 billion in 1998. Part of her desire to give her fortune away came from the tax loopholes her family used during that sale, she said.”

Again, no mention of IG Farben.

BBC also overlooked where the money came from, reporting, “She is a descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn, the founder of German chemical and pharmaceutical company, BASF, and inherited millions when her grandmother died in September 2022.”

The writers and editors blew a terrific story: NAZI HEIRESS TURNS HER BACK ON HER BLOOD MONEY.

Reporters could have asked her if she felt any guilt over great-grandpa’s ties to the Nazi regime, which included his company firing Jewish workers. They fired Fritz Haber, the chemist who developed Zyklon B as a pesticide, because he was Jewish.

He received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1918 for his work. He also developed the poison gas German used in World War I, a war crime.

But why complicate news stories with interesting facts and insights?

Instead of exploring the messy details of how her money was made, the media agreed to promote the narrative of an heiress sacrificing her fortune for the greater good of taxing inheritances.

Not that she lived by her words. Engelhorn could have just given the Austrian government her money, found a job to support herself and gone on her merry way.

But no, she is giving her money away to lefty causes. The NYT story said, “There were some rules in place, according to the council’s website. The money could not be given to groups or people who are ‘unconstitutional, hostile or inhumane,’ and it could not be invested with for-profit institutions. The money also couldn’t be redistributed to group members or related parties.”

We cannot blame the Nazi atrocities on heirs to a fortune made from Zyklon B, just as we cannot blame her ancestors for Engelhorn’s support of eliminating Jews from the river to the sea.

She is just a symptom of the disease.

In World War II, France capitulated quickly to avoid a repeat of World War I which wiped out a generation of Frenchmen. That’s understandable, but turning over thousands of French Jews over to the Germans is not. Remember Robert Clary, the actor who played LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes? He survived Buchenwald. 12 family members did not.

Now France has recognized Palestine.

We said never again. The devil had other plans.