September 25, 2025 – Dr. Susanna Kokkonen
When Today Is Repeating the Past
This story, happening today, has a connection to the Holocaust and WWII.
The Flotilla
Right now there is yet another flotilla (a group of ships if you like) sailing toward Gaza. This Global Sumud Flotilla (Arabic for steadfastness) is part of an organization called the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. They say they are extremely significant in opposing the Israeli Government. They also say that they are a symbol of a growing global movement. Hamas is openly backing all this, as reported by Arabic media.
Onboard with many celebrities is a famous Swedish young woman Greta Turnberg. Originally, this daughter of a wealthy Swedish family, started out as a climate activist. She is now very successfully making the Palestinian cause part of the climate movement.
But what is so amazing is the presence of another young woman on this flotilla.
Marlene Engelhorn – millionaire heiress whose fortune comes from her great-grandfather Friedrich Engelhorn, founder of BASF, the company behind Zyklon B – the gas used to murder Jews in Nazi death camps.
IG Farben
Marlene Engelhorn is a 30-year-old heir of a very well-known family in Austria. BASF, her family’s company was part of another corporation called IG Farben. This huge company prepared chemical products. It was a large corporation. It was this company that also made a gas we know as Zyklon B. The Nazis murdered over one million people just in the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau using this gas.
The Nazis started using Zyklon B in extermination camps in early 1942 to murder prisoners during the Holocaust.
Marlene Engelhorn wears the Palestinian flag in photos. She says that she is “against the genocide of the Palestinians” and “on the right side of history”. It is extremely difficult to comprehend this situation. Those who are careless with history gladly see her as being on the right side of history. But in fact she is taking the same side (the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish side) that her family took during WWII.
The whole issue of businesses during WWII and the death of Jewish businesses before the war is complex. We are not only speaking about the Holocaust but the years preceding it.
Nazism and Jewish Businesses
In 1933 the Nazis organized a known boycott of Jewish businesses. Little by little so-called Aryan owners took them over. There was little or no compensation to the rightful owners of those businesses. Then some of those companies had their own factories in the vicinity of concentration camps. In this case, Auschwitz-Birkenau was both a concentration and a death camp. These German companies benefited from the crime by using slave labor. The inmates of the camps were expendable and therefore there was no need to take diligent care of them. The companies paid to the SS, which benefitted from the arrangement.
This one specific company had a product that Nazis used to murder the inmates.
The young woman sailing toward Gaza has a family that benefited from the Holocaust, the mass murder of the Jews. Survivors of the murder came and built themselves a state. And now she is sailing on a boat because she wants to destroy that same state. We should say this clearly, as it is. The support these people are offering the terrorist organization, such as Hamas is, means that they are out to destroy the State of Israel.
Youth and the Holocaust’s Lessons
Social media and peer pressure easily mislead the young people living today. In a world that has nothing in black and white, but everything is just a shade of grey, it is exceedingly difficult for them to discern the truth. This story just demonstrates how important it is to offer the truth to young people. They need to hear when they are still receptive.
That is why telling the stories of the Holocaust, including to children and youth, in their full complexity is a vitally important mission at this age and time.
