In recent years, accusations have surfaced on social media claiming that Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), was the son of a Nazi army officer.
Online claims about Schwab’s father, Eugen Wilhelm Schwab, and his ties to Nazism in Germany are not limited to allegations that he was an army officer in the Third Reich. Several social media accounts also claim that the old SchwabArray, among other things, a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (if not in the army) and a close private confidant of Adolf Hitler, and that he worked for a Nazi contractor.
Although some media outlets have already refuted the claim that Eugen Schwab served in the Nazi army, there is no evidence to support claims that he had a private relationship with Hitler. He did, however, help run a company that provided ammunition to the Nazis. It was part of the Second World War Army, and Hitler referred the company for its facilities to the Third Reich.
Let’s start with the various viral claims. In October 2023, an article about X claimed, without providing evidence, that “if a former Nazi was the first head of the UN. . . and that a former Nazi was the first head of NATO. . . Is it really difficult for Klaus Schwab. . . the son of a Nazi. . . Does he claim to be the “leader of the Fourth Reich” to rule our world?This post has been viewed more than 587,000 times.
A similar claim, which Father Schwab, a “close confidant of Hitler,” shared on the r/conspiracy subreddit in 2022, comparing two photographs, one of Schwab and the other of a guy in Nazi uniform, purportedly his father:
(Reddit)
In May 2022, conservative political commentator Benny Johnson posted on X an allegation that Eugen Schwab had ties to the German Nazi Party. The message claimed that he “was a hardened member of the Nazi Party who served the Third Reich’s war effort as a director of Escher Wyss AG, a trading corporation that manufactured flamethrowers to kill Allies and burn villages.
Snopes reached out to the WEF, which did not promptly respond to a request for comment. Below, we describe our evidence of the identity of Schwab’s parents, the identity of the guy in the Nazi uniform in the viral image, and what Schwab did older. to Nazi Germany.
In Klaus Schwab’s 2021 eBook, “Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People, and the Planet,” he writes about his father, who was born in 1899 in Bern, Switzerland, on page 174: “My father ran a company in Ravensburg. called Escher Wyss. ” Throughout the e-book, Schwab continually referred to his father as “Eugen Wilhelm Schwab” and his mother as “Erika Epprecht,” to whom the e-book is dedicated.
It is worth noting that the elder Schwab’s photo and biography can also be seen in the FamilySearch segment of the Ancestors website (not to mention a wife named “Erika Epprecht”). Epprecht’s page on the same online page lists her husband as “Eugen. “Interestingly, none of their respective pages mention having a son named Klaus, this is most likely due to incomplete data shared on the platform and not doubts about the son’s ancestry; Klaus Schwab’s circle of relatives at other genealogical sites includes Geni and mentions Eugen Schwab as his father.
Gerguy’s online fact-checking page, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA), claimed that a spokesperson for Klaus Schwab had once proved that the man in the Ancestors photo was actually his father. The DPA also linked it to an X-shaped photo purporting to show Eugen Schwab’s face. Brazilian Immigration Visa 1960. La photo on the immigration documents matched the photo of Ancestors, which also corroborated the immigration reported through Elder Schwab in Rio de Janeiro that same year.
In 2022, Eugen Schwab’s immigration document shared on Facebook via the account Behind The Curtain – Forbidden Knowledge
(Behind the Curtain – Forbidden Knowledge and Hidden Truth/Facebook)
Using the photo of the guy in Nazi uniform, Snopes conducted a Google search for the opposite symbol, which led to the online platform Armed Conflicts and a page dedicated to Walther Dybilasz (also spelled Walter Dybilasz), who was on the list of primary generals in the Wehrmacht, or Unified Armed Forces of Nazi Germany. We also discovered the same photo in Traces of War. The two platforms shared main points about Dybilasz, adding his birth on October 1, 1892, in Altona, a community in Hamburg, and his death in 1950 in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp in Stalino, Ukraine.
In addition, in 2022, Agence France-Presse (AFP) noted that the German Federal Archives, or Bundesarchiv, published documents on Dybilasz that list him as a primary school general born on October 1, 1892, which corresponds to his date. other websites, as well as a photograph that resembles photographs of Dybilasz posted elsewhere.
So if the symbol doesn’t show Eugen Schwab, is it still imaginable that he was a Nazi?Simone Paulmichl of the Institute for Contemporary History showed Snopes that “there is no evidence that Schwab’s father played a significant role in the Nazi war. “Party. “
AFP spoke to Niels Weise, a researcher at the institute, who claimed that Schwab’s denazification records after World War II did not imply that he was a Nazi, stating that he was “not even a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). “”There is no sign that Schwab had any special relationship (or any) relationship with Hitler. “
Although there is no evidence to support the claim that Father Schwab was a Nazi army officer, party member, or confidant of Hitler, he worked as a director of an Escher Wyss mechanical engineering company that contributed to the Nazi war effort.
According to the National Library of New Zealand, “Swiss engineering firm Escher Wyss
In an English translation of Jürgen Dunsch’s 2016 German e-book, “Organized by the Powerful: Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum in Davos,” he wrote:
Jacob Schmidheiny of the Swiss business family of the same name took the opportunity to hire a German-Swiss expert to manage the turbine plant of his company Escher Wyss in Ravensburg. Klaus Schwab’s family has now returned to Germany. of the 1930s, more precisely in Upper Swabia.
In Paul Tice’s book “The Race to Zero”, the writer refers to Eugen Schwab and the company he helped run in Ravensburg, where his son was born, after his family returned to Germany from Switzerland: “Eugen, who was also a commercial engineer, actively supported the German war effort in World War II. Father Schwab worked for the Swiss commercial manufacturer Escher Wyss.
In addition, Tice writes the following about Escher Wyss:
Escher Wyss was given the name “National Socialist Model Company” by Adolf Hitler. In addition to the munitions factory located in Schwab, the commercial conglomerate Escher Wyss was also deeply involved in the Nazi atomic weapons program. The use of forced nuclear weapons work at the Ravensburg factory during World War II was shown in an August 24, 2000 press release via the Swiss National Press Agency.
In fact, the Swiss National Press Agency provided a document, dated 24 August 2000, in the context of the litigation over the assets of Holocaust victims initiated against Swiss banks, which cited that the Escher Wyss plant in Ravensburg had used “Swiss capital and forced labour”. in Germany” using some 200 forced laborers, drawn from the “nearby Nazi camps,” according to Politifact.
The U. S. National Archives has made several references to Escher Wyss in the “Holocaust Era Assets” segment of its website, as part of its efforts to recover assets looted by the Nazis from those who suffered and survived the Holocaust:
Switzerland’s Escher-Wyss is on a first order for Germany. The flamethrowers are shipped from Switzerland under the name Brennstoffbehaelter. 1 in September 1944.
. . .
Hungarian bauxite was once shipped to Germany and Switzerland for refining. Later, a government union built an aluminum plant in Dunaalmas. Electrical power was provided; Hungary supplied coal mines and equipment to the Swiss company Escher-Wyss. Production began in 1941, 2 pp. May 1944.
Another English translation of a passage from Dunsch’s e-book also notes that “after returning from the United States, Klaus Schwab immediately joined the board of directors of Escher Wyss. This is not entirely surprising, because Escher Wyss, the company from which my father’s factory in Ravensburg comes from, was successful. “
According to Schwab’s curriculum vitae on the WEF website, he followed in his father’s footsteps and held a controlling position at Escher Wyss from 1967 to 1970, when he served on the board of directors of “Sulzer Escher Wyss AG, Zurich, a production company with operations in several countries and 10,000 employees. “
Thus, there is no evidence to corroborate the claim that Schwab’s father was an officer in the Nazi army, or that he was a “close confidant of Hitler” who was a member of the Nazi Party; in fact, he was a Nazi-era industrialist who worked high-ranking at Escher Wyss, an engineering firm that was also used as a defense contractor, aiding Nazi war efforts by supplying ammunition to the regime while resorting to forced hard labor in its factories.
Klaus Schwab, 86, has long been the target of online conspiracy theories. They point to a genuine initiative known as the “Great Reset,” which he and the WEF carried out in June 2020 during COVID-19 lockdowns. This initiative aims to motivate global policies that “reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more disgustingly rich future,” Schwab wrote.
In the past, Snopes covered up rumors about Klaus Schwab, adding that he was hospitalized and calling Elon Musk a “dangerous extremist. “
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“On the left is the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab. On the right, his father, Hitler’s closest confidant, the industrialist and fascist ‘Eugen Schwab’, in uniform. Klaus was born in Hitler’s Germany in 1938. ” Reddit, 2022, https://www. reddit. com/r/conspiracy/comments/ux2res/on_the_left_you_can_see_the_founder_of_the_world/.
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Nikki Dobrin was founded in Los Angeles and in the past worked for The Walt Disney Company, and also wrote and edited for People, USA Today, and The Hill.