Great-grandfather founded company that produced Zyklon B gas for Nazi death camps; great-granddaughter joins Gaza flotilla
Marlene Engelhorn, a descendant of a German family that owned the chemical company that produced the deadly gas used to murder millions of Jews in Nazi death camps, is making her way to the Gaza Strip on the "Peace flotilla."
Engelhorn shared on Tuesday that she has boarded the ship: “I am against genocide, apartheid, illegal occupation, and in favor of a free Palestine.”
The organizers of the new flotilla plan to sail to Gaza with dozens of boats in the coming weeks.
They claim that people from 44 nationalities will be on board. The Mediterranean port of departure is being kept secret. The pro-Palestinian organization “The Global Movement for Gaza” is proudly sharing the wealthy heiress’s participation on its social media accounts: “We are very happy that Marlene Engelhorn is on the right side of history.”
The German-Austrian heiress comes from a wealthy industrial family that sold its company, Boehringer Mannheim, in the mid-1990s.
She is a descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn, founder of the BASF chemical conglomerate.
During the Third Reich, BASF was part of IG Farben – a merger of the largest chemical and pharmaceutical companies in Germany.
During World War II, the company produced poisonous gases, including Zyklon B, which was used in the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps starting in September 1941 for the systematic murder of over one million prisoners, most of them Jews.
Dov Gil-Har is a corespondent for KAN 11.
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