BRENDAN O’NEILL: Meet the Zyklon B heiress who is sailing to Gaza.

Sometimes something so perfect happens you find yourself Googling furiously to make sure it’s really true. The news that one Marlene Engelhorn from Austria is joining the next flotilla to Gaza is one such story. For Ms Engelhorn is an heiress of a German industrial dynasty that profited from the production of Zyklon B, the cyanide that was used to gas and slaughter millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Her family profited from the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people and now she rages against the Jewish State – who was it who said history doesn’t repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes?

Ms Engelhorn inherited $27.1million from her family’s coffers. And some of that generational wealth has pretty disgusting origins. She is a descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn, who founded the German chemicals giant, BASF. In the 1920s, BASF merged with IG Farben. Some readers may have heard of that latter chemical conglomerate – its name lives in infamy as the producer of the poisonous gas the Nazis used to try to wipe the Jews from the face of the Earth. When her grandmother died in 2022, Ms Engelhorn got millions of Euros from this dynasty with a dark history.

As Mark Steyn once wrote, “The old joke — that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz — gets truer every week.”