The founder of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab is related to the Rothschild family.
This is not true. The post suggests Mr Schwab is related to a woman whose surname before marriage was Rothschild but is not directly related to the House of Rothschild. Mr Schwab has said they are not related.
Klaus Schwab wrote that four billion people would die through planned epidemics, war and starvation by 2050.
He didn’t write this. It’s a passage from a 1992 conspiratorial text which also seems to wrongly attribute it to novelist H.G. Wells.
An Instagram post suggests the World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab is related to the Rothschild family.
The post includes two photos: one is a photo of a woman with the caption “Marianne Schwab, née Rothschild”. The post appears to imply Klaus Schwab is related, via Marianne Schwab, to the Rothschild family.
The other image is a photo of a book passage captioned “A page from Klaus Schwabs (sic) book”. Text from the book states “At least 4 billion ‘useless eaters’ shall be eliminated by the year 2050 by means of limited wars, organized epidemics of fatal rapid-acting diseases and starvation.”
None of this is true.
The information about Marianne Schwab comes from an article about the Holocaust. Marianne Schwab, born in 1919 in Frankfurt, fled Germany in 1939. Mrs Schwab was the daughter of Louis Rothschild. According to the Holocaust Memorial Center although her father was a banker, his family was not directly related to the House of Rothschild - a wealthy family who have been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories.
Mrs Schwab arrived in the United States in 1940, where she met her future husband, Fred Schwab, with whom she had two children, Leslie and Madeleine.
A biography of Klaus Schwab published by the World Economic Forum states he was born in 1938, in Ravensberg, Germany. Mr Schwab also dedicated his book “Stakeholder Capitalism”, published in 2021, to his parents Eugen Wilhelm Schwab and Erika Epprecht.
Mr Schwab told the German Press Agency in 2021 "I don't know Marianne Schwab. She does not belong to our family.”
As we’ve said before, the book pictured in the post is not by Klaus Schwab. It is an excerpt from a 1992 conspiratorial text called “Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300” by John Coleman. In the text, Coleman appears to incorrectly attribute the “4 billion ‘useless eaters’” passage to science fiction writer H.G. Wells.
Image courtesy of the World Economic Forum, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Klaus Schwab is not part of the Rothschild family nor did he write the passage referenced in the Instagram post.
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