{"id":454642,"date":"2026-03-03T03:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T03:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/454642\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T03:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T03:26:08","slug":"sir-michael-moritz-wants-german-citizenship-over-hostility-to-jews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/454642\/","title":{"rendered":"Sir Michael Moritz wants German citizenship over ‘hostility’ to Jews"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 71-year-old, who holds both UK and US passports, is the richest Welshman who has ever lived, external<\/a>, with a wealth built on investments in companies like Yahoo and Google that made him billions during the dot-com boom of the early 2000s.<\/p>\n

In a memoir called Ausl\u00e4nder \u2013 the German word for foreigner or outsider \u2013 Sir Michael charts his family’s treatment under the Nazis.<\/p>\n

His paternal grandparents, Max and Minnie Moritz, were among swathes of relatives killed during the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Using public archives he found that two of his relatives, his great-uncle Oskar Moritz and his cousin Mira Marx, were photographed by the Gestapo as they were forced onto buses that transported them to their deaths.<\/p>\n

Sir Michael’s parents had escaped Germany and settled in Cardiff<\/a>, where he attended the now-closed Howardian High School in Penylan.<\/p>\n

He said the sense of being an outsider had accompanied him since childhood and recalled opening the phone directory as a teenager and scanning the “M” section, hoping his family would not be the only entry under “Moritz”.<\/p>\n

“There was no shortage of Evans’ and Thomas’, but we were the only Moritz.<\/p>\n

“And to me, that was as if \u2013 in the margin, in big black capital letters \u2013 it said Jew.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 71-year-old, who holds both UK and US passports, is the richest Welshman who has ever lived, external,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-454642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}