Written evidence submitted by
John Mann MP, Chair, All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism

Please find enclosed two papers which I would be grateful if you could circulate to committee members.

The first is a response to the themes that Ken Livingstone has been adopting in his discourse, including at his hearing and in his submission to your committee. It is by no means exhaustive but it does provide some of the rationale for my having taken issue with his remarks.

Second is a catalogue of abuse I have received online and to my office. It is a snapshot of the torrent of antisemitic hatred I have received but I think it important for committee members to see. Should you wish to publish an edited version of this document, I would be happy to provide the file in its original format.

John Mann MP
Chair, All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism

Annex 1: response to the themes that Ken Livingstone has been adopting in his discourse

1.  Ken Livingstone claims that Hitler had, in 1932, a policy of support for Zionism. 1.1 Sources & Responses

1.1.1 Hitler was supporting Zionism

Home Affairs Select Committee1: “… when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy was that the Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism. He wanted all the half a million German Jews out. At that stage, his view was to move them out. By autumn 1933, he had negotiated a deal with a German Zionist organisation that led to 66,000 German Jews being moved to what is now Israel. Had the Zionists not negotiated that deal, those 66,000 Jews would have died in the gas chambers.”

Home Affairs Select Committee: “He supported the Zionists because, by doing that deal, the Zionists undermined the worldwide boycott of German goods that were organised by Jewish groups all over the world. In 1937—in August I think—there was a meeting at the German Foreign Ministry of senior Nazi officials who were all worried that the movement of Jews to what was then Palestine could lead to the creation of a Jewish state, which would become a focus for anti-Nazism. They were recommending to Hitler that he stop that. Hitler directed them to continue to move the Jews to Palestine.”

Home Affairs Select Committee: “If you look at the situation, from the moment Hitler came to power, antisemitic legislation, discrimination, absolutely endemic. The only group of Jews he worked with was the Zionists, and his deputy, Heydrich, wrote in 1935 or 1936 in his diary that “There are two kinds of Jews: those that wish to be assimilated and the Zionists, and the Zionists are the ones we should work with”.

Home Affairs Select Committee: “I simply point out that if you go to the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, you can pick up this document, which they give out, which shows that exactly what I said is true. It lists Hitler’s collaboration with Zionists.”

Home Affairs Select Committee: Mr Winnick: “… In fact, the only agreement, basically, was the one that you rightly referred to, which no one denies—the Haavara or transfer agreement, which allowed some 60,000 Jews to leave with their assets. Is that not so?” Ken Livingstone: “That is exactly the one I was referring to. That was Hitler’s support for Zionism and at that World Zionist Congress, there was a vote of 240 to 48 opposing the worldwide boycott of Nazi goods.”

Home Affairs Select Committee (Supplementary Evidence)2:              The [1933 Transfer] Agreement has been widely documented. In my questioning by the Committee the source I had originally quoted, 'Zionism in the Age of the Dictators' by Lenni Brenner, was dismissed

1 Home Affairs Select Committee, 14th June 2016, transcript available at: http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/home-affairs- committee/antisemitism/oral/34413.html

2          http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/home-affairs- committee/antisemitism/written/34643.html

as not authoritative. I therefore mentioned other more authoritative sources to

the Committee that are self-evidently serious academic works based on proven facts that offer reasoned economic and political analysis of the issues:

(a)        'The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust' by the historian Yf'aat Weiss, which is available from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Resource Center in Israel.[v]

(b)        'Zionism in National Socialist Jewish Policy in Germany, 1933-39' by the Professor of history Francis R. J. Nicosia, which is in the University of Chicago Press's Journal of Modern History[vi].

Responses

Professor Richard Evans3 –

(i)  On Hitler and Zionism

“The row started with Livingstone's statement: 'When Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.'”

“Jews who wanted to leave Germany for other parts of the world had to do so under much less favourable conditions, since they were not allowed to take more than a minimal amount of their assets with them. So the Ha'avara Agreement encouraged sixty thousand German Jews to leave for Palestine from 1933 until the beginning of the war. The German Zionist Federation even expressed its sympathy with the basic principles of Nazism. In a letter addressed to Hitler on 22 June 1933, it argued that 'Zionism believes that the rebirth of the national life of a people, which is now occurring in Germany through the emphasis on its Christian and national character, must also come about among the Jewish people. For the Jewish people too, national origin, religion, common destiny and a sense of its uniqueness must be of decisive importance to its existence.'”

“As the great Jewish historian of the Holocaust, Saul Friedländer, who quotes these passages in the first volume of his masterpiece 'Nazi Germany and the Jews', points out, the Zionists believed that the Ha'avara Agreement would guarantee the emigration to Palestine of fifteen to twenty thousand German Jews a year for the next twenty to thirty years. The Zionists*, as another leading Jewish historian, the late and much-missed David Cesarani, points out in his posthumously published book 'Final Solution: The fate of the Jews, 1933-49', were not interested in improving the conditions of those Jews who remained in Germany. For them, Nazi persecution and violence simply proved their point that life in the Diaspora was ultimately untenable. In the end, Zionists were keen to grasp at any means in order to bring more Jews to Palestine in the hope of providing the basis, ultimately, for a Jewish state.”

“For all this dubious rhetoric, given the fact that Nazi policy was to make life in Germany unbearable for those they defined as Jews, who could blame the Zionists for doing a deal with the Nazis to get as many Jews as possible out of their terrible predicament? After all, similar policies were pursued on the eve of World War by the British government, bringing out some ten thousand Jewish children from Nazi-controlled Central Europe to the United Kingdom in the Kindertransporte.”

“None of this means that 'Hitler was a Zionist'. Hitler's overriding aim was to remove the 500,000 or so Jews who lived in the Third Reich from Germany by any means possible. For

3 Regius Professor Emeritus of History at Cambridge University, and the author of "The Coming of the Third Reich", "The Third Reich in Power" and "The Third Reich at War", which together form a comprehensive history of Nazi Germany, published by Penguin. Knighted in 2012 for services to scholarship. By Email.

the most part, this meant taking away their livelihoods, by dismissing them from state employment (on the basis of a law passed on 7 April 1933), by excluding them from the professions, culture, and the arts, and by forcing them to dispose of their assets in the process of so-called 'Aryanization', which also began in 1933. Hitler encouraged boycotts of Jewish- owned shops, most notoriously in the action of 1 April 1933, and he fomented mass mob violence against Jews on numerous occasions, culminating in the nationwide pogrom of 9-10 November 1938, in which over a thousand synagogues were burned to the ground, 7,500 Jewish-owned shops were trashed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, put into concentration camps, beaten up and maltreated until they promised to emigrate.”

“Behind all this was Hitler's paranoid belief that 'the Jews' had 'stabbed the German army in the back' by fomenting revolution at home in 1918. In fact of course the German army had been defeated in the field, and this was what sparked the revolution that overthrew the Kaiser, which was led by socialists, among whom there were some Jews, but not in fact that many, and certainly none who considered themselves Jews by nation or practised the Jewish faith.”

“During the Second World War, when of necessity the Ha'avara Agreement came to a halt, the Nazis came into contact with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, whom they tried to win over by promising to exterminate the Jews who lived in Palestine. This was not because Hitler had 'gone mad', but because in truth the Ha'avara Agreement was only ever a temporary measure designed to prepare Germany for war by removing what Hitler considered, quite bizarrely,

to be a subversive element from the home population.”

“It was of course never Hitler's policy to relocate ALL German Jews to Palestine, as KL claims; the various historians quoted are correct in saying he wanted to get them out of Germany and did not care where they went.”

* “the Zionists in Germany were a very small and marginal group in the 1920s and 1930s, with very, very little support from the Jewish population, most of whom considered themselves German and did not want to emigrate if they could possibly avoid it”.

(ii)            On Ken Livingstone’s supplementary supporting texts and the Ha’avara agreement: “The definitive work on Nazi-Zionist relations. The standard work here is by an American historian, Francis Nicosia, "Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany", published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. He has also written the standard work on "The Third Reich and the Palestine Question", published in 1985 by I.B.Tauris in London. Both books have been translated into German and both rest on extensive research into the relevant archives in Germany and elsewhere. The article by Nicosia cited by KL in the Journal of Modern History (vol. 50, No. 4, December 1978), 'Zionism in National Socialist Jewish Policy in Germany, 1933-39', is an early version of parts of the same author's 1985 book, which should be cited in preference to the article (it is significant that Nicosia does not cite the article in either of his two books). The article by the Israeli historian Yf'aat Weiss, 'The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust', in Yad Vashem Studies xxvi (Jerusalem, 1998), pp. 129-72, is a scholarly investigation, using extensive archival research, into a narrower question, namely the

controversial status of the Ha'avara Agreement in the Jewish and Zionist communities, which derived from the fact that by transferring capital and goods from Germany abroad, the Agreement ran up against international Jewish attempts to implement a boycott of German goods in the years 1933-39. My conclusion is that KL is citing reputable work here, but he should not have simply gone online to find articles, he should have consulted the major books by Nicosia, which are easily available in libraries”.

“There are many sources for the Ha'avara Agreement, but in English the best account is by Nicosia, 'The Third Reich and the Palestine Question',pp. 41-49. The Agreement was worked out over several months in 1933 and finalized on 28 August 1933. It was a very complicated set of financial arrangements which allowed Jews to circumvent currency export restrictions introduced during the slump in 1931 on condition this enabled German exports to go to Palestine”.

Email from Yad Vashem Holocaust Centre, Jerusalem disputing KL claim (Appendix 1)

Mein Kampf, written in 1925, makes Hitler’s views very clear: “While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.”4

Author and researcher Paul Bogdanor5 writes that Lenni Brenners book6 (to which Ken Livingstone refers) uses isolated texts from an article published in 1937 by Rabbi Joachim Prinz7, a German Zionist. In these isolated texts, Brenner is suggesting collaboration between the Nazis and Zionists. (Appendix 2: Full text)

The rest of Prinz’s text reads: “In those days, we believed in the slim possibility of saving the German Jews, but nothing happened… When we realised that the German Government never intended to solve the Jewish problem, and that its only attitude toward Jews was one of humiliation, degradation, and the spirit of the Sturmer, we turned our thoughts in the direction of saving whatever possible from the enormous bankruptcy of a once wealthy Jewry…All this was most disagreeable and painful to the Zionists. But the Nazi attitude toward the Zionists was only a facade. In reality, the Zionists were and are miserably treated… During the years, Zionists have frequently been arrested. Zionist meetings were forbidden or dissolved… Zionist officials were and still are frequently called to the Gestapo and examined in not very polite terms. In brief, the seeming pro-Zionist attitude of the German Government is not an expression of, and should not be confused with, cooperation on the part of one side or the other.”8

Deborah E. Lipstadt9, Dorot professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University writes: “Hitler considered a Jewish homeland a threat to humanity. The Nazis believed that the Jews did not need a state, because they were more powerful than any state; the Zionists believed that the Jews needed a state, because they were powerless without one.”

4 Mein Kampf, available to scholars on request

5 Harry’s Place, 2016, Ken Livingstone, Lenni Brenner, and Falsified Evidence, available at: http://hurryupharry.org/2016/05/01/ken-livingstone-lenni-brenner-and-falsified-evidence/

6 Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Lawrence Hill Books, 1983).

7 Joachim Prinz, ‘Zionism Under the Nazi Government,’ The New Palestine, September 17, 1937. Reprinted in Young Zionist, November 1937.

8 Fathom, An Antisemitic Hoax: Lenni Brenner on Zionist ‘Collaboration’ With the Nazis, available at: http://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/ Harry’s Place, 2016, Ken Livingstone, Lenni Brenner, and Falsified Evidence, available at: http://hurryupharry.org/2016/05/01/ken-livingstone-lenni-brenner-and-falsified-evidence/

9 CNN, 2016, The perils of ignoring Holocaust history, Deborah E. Lipstadt, available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/04/opinions/livingstone-is-wrong-about-zionism-lipstadt/index.html

“In Livingstone's case, he has distorted the fact that in August 1933, German Zionists, desperate to help Jews get out of the Reich, concluded the Ha'avara or Transfer agreement, the only formal contract between Nazi Germany and a Zionist organization. Under its provisions, Jews, after paying an increasingly debilitating emigration tax, could deposit a sum of money with the Zionist organization and then, upon arrival in Palestine, use credit on those funds to buy property.”

“The agreement was of tremendous financial benefit to the Germans, because under the agreement Jewish emigrants often had to forfeit many of their possessions before leaving the country. And it was hardly a negotiation between equals. There was no finding of common ground. The Nazis held the power and the Jews only had ideas to try to blunt the assault directed at them. While no Jews celebrated this interaction with the Nazis, it nonetheless saved approximately 60,000 lives.”

“While many people, myself included, may have differences with aspects of Israeli policies, to link Israel with the Third Reich is not only historically farfetched but is also revolting. The notion that the murderers and the victims were working together is so far beyond historical acceptability as to be beyond the pale.”

Rainer Schulz10 (Professor of Modern European History and General Editor "The Holocaust in History and Memory", University of Essex) writes: “that the Haavara Agreement in August 1933 was the only way for the Zionist Federation to save Jews from an increasingly hostile emerging regime. The Haavara Agreement does not mean the Nazis were ever Zionists.”

“It took time until it became clear how this extermination could be effectively executed and until the Nazi authorities felt that such a radical “final solution” could be pushed through. In the meantime, the Nazis tried various means of “ridding” Germany of its Jewish population – including “encouraging” Jews to emigrate, forced relocation, and outright evictions – while at the same time pauperising them and confiscating their possessions.”

“The Haavara Agreement is the first example of a Nazi programme of organised Jewish relocation. Other and more radical examples include the mass expulsion of Polish and stateless Jews from Germany to Poland in October 1938, and the so-called Madagascar Plan, the attempt to relocate the Jewish population to the island of Madagascar, then a French colony.” These policies do not in any way resemble Zionism. However critical one might be of Zionist policies in action, Zionism was a movement based on the right of self- determination. It originated as a national liberation movement, both mirroring the aims and aspirations of other national movements in 19th-century Europe and responding to the surge of anti-semitism in the newly established European nation-states.”

“The Nazis' plans for “concentrating” Jews in specific territories, be they Palestine or Madagascar, had nothing whatsoever to do with self-determination. These were expressions of the complete opposite: the use of force to strip Jews of all their rights, property and dignity.”

Professor Jeffrey Herf11, author of the award-winning book “Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust” said, “Hitler despised Zionism. In fact he ridiculed the idea as he was convinced that the Jews would be incapable of establishing and then defending a state. More importantly, he and his government viewed the prospect of a Jewish state in Palestine as part of the broader international Jewish conspiracy which his fevered imagination presented as a dire threat to Germany. While (after robbing them of most of their possessions) the Nazis did allow some German Jews to leave the country in the 1930s

10 The Independent, 2016, Hitler and Zionism: Why the Haavara Agreement does not mean the Nazis were Zionists, Rainer Schulze, available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/adolf-hitler- zionism-zionist-nazis-haavara-agreement-ken-livingstone-labour-antisemitism-row-a7009981.html

11 Fathom, Hitler and the Nazis’ Anti-Zionism, available at: http://fathomjournal.org/hitler-and-the-nazis-anti- zionism-2/

in order to travel to Palestine, that policy was primarily driven by a desire to get the Jews out of Germany rather than to build a Jewish state in Palestine.”

“This ignorance about the implications of the Holocaust is stunning. As the Israeli historian Anita Shapira has pointed out, it is only a half-truth to say that Israel was founded because of the Holocaust. The other half of the truth is that literally millions of Jews in Europe who might have contributed to the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine could not do so because the Nazis had murdered them. The Holocaust itself was an enormous blow to the Zionist project.”

“In short, in both word and deed, Nazi Germany did all it could to ensure that a Jewish state in Palestine never would emerge”.

Historian Andrew Roberts12 states that “The Nazis couldn’t frankly care less where the Jews went, so long as they left Germany, preferably with as few possessions as possible”. Roberts continues… “Madagascar Plan of July 1940 which they hoped would involve mass migration to places where the Jews would suffer and eventually die of disease and malnutrition, all long before the full-scale genocidal programme conceived at the Wannsee Conference in 1942… The idea that Hitler ever wanted a fully-functioning successful Jewish state in Palestine – the dream of Zionists – is ludicrous, as Mr Livingstone undoubtedly knows”. Roberts writes that rather than “genuinely intending to make some valid historical point about the migration policies of the putative Third Reich in the 1930s”… “The sole reason Ken Livingstone brought up the Fuhrer in his interview was to be as vicious and loathsome as he possibly could to any Jews listening.”

John David Blake13 a London History teacher wrote: “There are fascinating, tragic and terrible stories to be found in the events they are selectively attentive to… But anyone with a smattering of historical learning and even a shred of integrity can see these facts cannot bear an interpretation that Hitler was a Zionist. The often arbitrary survival of evidence from the past into the present does generate valid disputes about historical details, and sometimes makes it impossible to conclude a “right” answer. However, any narrative that deliberately ignores obviously relevant evidence is very clearly a wrong answer… The Toxic inattentiveness to the rules of the historical discipline… is the breeding ground for the conspiracy theories that frame their understanding of how change is achieved. These parasites on the past find a nugget of fact, rip it from any sensible context and build atop it whatever deranged narrative pushes their cause the best…”

1.1.2 : Hitler/Nazi Policy of 1920 and 1932

28th April, in person, Milbank14: “That was the policy they ran on in 1932. His view was to deport all the Jews of Germany to Israel… Hitler was a mad anti-Zionist, he wanted to kill all Jews but his policy in ’32 when he won that election was to deport Germany’s Jews to Israel. And the Zionist movement has secret meetings with his administration talking about that.

These are historical facts.”

In Ken Livingstone’s book15 ‘You Can’t Say That’ he references “Hitler’s 1932 policy of ‘Jews to Palestine’.

12 CAPX, 2016, Ken Livingstone gets the history wrong on anti-semitism and Hitler, available at: http://capx.co/ken-livingstone-gets-the-history-wrong-on-anti-semitism-and-hitler/

13 Labour Teachers, 2016, Historical Truth @johndavidblake, available at: http://www.labourteachers.org.uk/historical-truth-johndavidblake/

14 John Mann Confronts Ken Livingstone, 28th April 2016, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW5IujnSLU8 (at 27 seconds)

15 “You Can’t Say That” (Memoirs) by Ken Livingstone, 2011, P221

Home Affairs Select Committee: “On 6 July 1920, Hitler made a speech in which he said this—and I quote: “Jews belong to Palestine and it is only there that they can expect their full civil rights”. And as I said, when he came to power, he negotiated a deal to move Germany’s Jews to Palestine. And I have never criticised the Zionist movement for making that deal, because the only other alternative at the time was the worldwide boycott of German goods by Jews all over the world, and as we saw with South Africa, that didn’t work then, and I don’t think it would have done. So they had to deal with who was in power, however repellent, however antisemitic, but it saved the lives of 66,000 Jews.”

Home Affairs Select Committee: “Hitler went into that election saying his policy was to move Germany’s Jews to what was then Palestine… He said it. He said it in 1920.”

Responses

Professor Richard Evans

(i)  On “Jews to Palestine”

“There is no basis in historical fact for a policy of "Jews to Palestine” or anything similar in 1932 existing, if by "policy" we mean government policy (the Nazis came to power on 30 January 1933). However, on a broader base, the pre-Nazi governments of the Weimar Republic supported the British Mandate in Palestine and also the idea of a Jewish homeland there, as announced in the Balfour Declaration in 1915, largely because it saw this as advantageous to German economic interests in the Middle East”.

(ii)  On the Nazi Party Programme

“The Nazi Party Programme (Appendix 3), issued in 1920, was declared unalterable and permanent, and was not changed at any time except in one very minor respect concerning the issue of landownership in Germany. It can easily be consulted in English translation in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds. 'Nazism 1919-1945', Vol. I, 1998 edition by Exeter University Press, pages 14-16. There are 25 points. While it calls for the removal of German citizenship and voting rights from Jews, their banning from work in or ownership of the media, and their legal classification as resident aliens, there is no mention of transfer to Palestine”.

(iii)  On Hitler’s speeches

“Hitler recorded in his autobiographical tract 'Mein Kampf' that Zionism had come to his attention during his Vienna years before 1914. He thought the Jews were engaged in a global conspiracy to destroy German civilization and that Zionists wanted to establish a state in Palestine as a base from which to operate the conspiracy, as Hitler said on 13 August 1920. 'The Jews...have no thought of building up a Jewish state in Palestine, so that they might perhaps inhabit it, but they only want a central organization of their international world- cheating,,,a refuge for convicted rascals and a high school for future rogues'. He also said Jews were incapable of building a state anyway. However, on 6 July 1920 during a speech in Munich in which he demanded the removal of Jews from Germany, when a heckler raised the point that this violated their human rights, he said that the Jew 'should seek human rights where they belong, in his own state of Palestine'. There was thus a basic contradiction in Nazi policy (Nicosia,'The Third Reich and the Palestine Question', pp. 26-28; Hitler's speeches are available in a German edition by Eberhard Jaeckel and this one was first printed in an article in the respected Vierteljahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte in 1963). It is noticeable that Hitler said very little about the Jews in the later 1920s, first because he was banned from speaking for several years, then because the Nazis decided that antisemitism was not a vote winner”.

Mein Kampf, written in 1925, to reiterate, makes Hitler’s views very clear: “While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.”

British historian, journalist and broadcaster Andrew Roberts16 states that: “Adolf Hitler did not “win” either the July or the November 1932 elections in Germany; in the latter he only gained 33% of the vote, giving the Nazi Party 196 seats in a Reichstag of 584…More centrally, however, insofar as Hitler had a stated rather than inferred policy towards Germany’s Jews at all, it was to force them to leave Germany, but not specifically to Palestine, which was then governed by the British under League of Nations Mandate and was not accepting European Jews in significant numbers.”

Deborah Lipstadt17 (Denying the Holocaust, first published in the UK by Penguin Books in 1974) wrote in reference to this strain of Holocaust denial in two publications The Myth of the Six Million [1969] and Did Six Million Really Die? [1974]; “In order to rehabilitate the reputation of National Socialism, these two publications tried to prove that the Nazis' intention was emigration, not annihilation. First, they argued the Final Solution was nothing but a plan to evacuate all Jews from the Reich. Then they tried to give this evacuation plan historical legitimacy by linking it with the name of the founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl."

Michael Burleigh18, a historian and expert on Nazi Germany writes on Hitler’s declared intentions that “In 1922 Hitler told an army journalist that on coming to power he would publicly hang Jews until there were none left in Germany. Two years later in Mein Kampf he wrote: "If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.””

1.1.3 : Hitler ‘Went Mad’

BBC RADIO- 28 APRIL19: “Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”

16 CAPX, 2016, Ken Livingstone gets the history wrong on anti-semitism and Hitler, available at: http://capx.co/ken-livingstone-gets-the-history-wrong-on-anti-semitism-and-hitler/

17 Denying The Holocaust, The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Deborah E. Lipstadt, available at: http://vho.org/aaargh/engl/dl/denying6.html

18 The Jewish Chronicle, 2016, History shows Hitler never was a Zionist, available at: http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/analysis/157787/history-shows-hitler-never-was-a-zionist

19 BBC Radio Interview, 28th April 2016, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36163432 BBC Radio Interview, 28th April 2016, transcript available at: https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/social- affairs/discrimination/news/74365/ken-livingstone-bbc-radio-london-israel-lobby-tries http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-anti-semitism-row-full-transcript-of-ken-livingstones-    interviews-a7005311.html

JTV Interview with Alan Mendoza on 20th June20- In the 1930’s Hitler was a racist and antisemitic… “But if you actually look at his record from 1935 when he reoccupies the Rhineland, up until the defeat of France, his military strategy works at every stage. Then he makes that catastrophic error of invading Russia and locks himself into defeat. When you read about the chaos around Hitler in the final 2 or 3 years of the war, the decisions he is making are completely irrational.”)

Responses

Professor Richard Evans “...just to state the obvious, the detailed research on Hitler's medical history carried out by a number of historians and physicians - and there are good records to back up their conclusions – has shown conclusively that he was in every normal sense of the word quite sane, nor was his judgment impaired by any of the standard medications that he took on the advice of his doctors”.

Deborah E. Lipstadt,21 professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University writes: “It is completely historically wrong to argue, as Livingstone did, that "until Hitler went mad," he was a compatriot of the Jews. Already in "Mein Kampf," published in 1925 before he became chancellor in 1933, he warned of a "Jewish virus," described Jews as "vile" and a "pestilence," and called for their expulsion from society.”

1.1.4 : The Reich Flag Law

KL Book (2011, Pg. 221): “Hitler’s 1932 policy of ‘Jews to Palestine”… “To encourage Zionists, the Nuremberg laws in 1935 allowed only two flags to be flown in Germany, the Swastika and the blue and white Zionist banner.”(A claim repeated in an interview with Alan Mendoza, JTV, 20th June 2016.)

Professor Richard Evans “The Reich Flag Law, one of the laws passed at the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1935, made the black-white-red flag with the swastika the national flag.

Another of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, banned Jews from displaying this flag. Paragraph 4 part 2 allowed Jews to fly flags with 'Jewish colours'. However, the law did not say what these were, nor in fact did anyone have the faintest idea, least of all German Jews. As an act of protest a young Jew, Martin Friedlaender, made a flag in blue and white, with a white star of David on the blue half, and hung it out of his window. Blue and white were the Zionist colours but the flag had no official status of any kind either with the Zionist Federation of Germany or with the Nazis. A Nazi magazine carried a photo of Friedlaender's flag with the sarcastic caption: 'Thus the riddle of what the Jewish flag actually looks like has now been solved'. In fact there was no agreement for many years on the Zionist flag, and the present-day Israeli flag is completely different in shape from Friedlaender's. The information here can easily be accessed in English on the website of the Jewish Museum in Berlin”.

20 JTV Interview with Alan Mendoza, 20th June 2016, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W2mbCdHY0g

21 CNN, 2016, The perils of ignoring Holocaust history, available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/04/opinions/livingstone-is-wrong-about-zionism-lipstadt/index.html

2.          Ken Livingstone claims to have not heard an antisemitic utterance in 47 years and says he cannot recall any Labour MPs raising the issue of antisemitism until three months ago. He has suggested claims of antisemitism are a smear

2.1 Sources

BBC RADIO22: “I’ve been in the Labour party for 47 years; I’ve never heard anyone say anything antisemitic. I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the state of Israel and its abuse of Palestinians but I’ve never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic... “

BBC RADIO: “As I’ve said, I’ve never heard anybody say anything anti-Semitic…”

Home Affairs Select Committee23: “…It is 47 years. I have never heard anyone saying “antisemitic”. I recall, back in 1970, someone complaining in Norwood Labour party that if blacks wanted to be part of Britain they shouldn’t be doing songs such as “Young, Gifted and Black”. That is the last time I heard a racist comment in the Labour party.”

Home Affairs Select Committee: “I do not recall, in my 47 years, any Labour MP ever raising the issue of antisemitism in the Labour party, until three months ago when we had that very nasty campaign for the election of the youth delegate to Labour’s national executive.”

Home Affairs Select Committee: “But there is no inherent antisemitism in the Labour party any more than there is any form of racism.”

JTV Interview24: “Because in my 47 years in the Labour Party I have never come across anyone saying anything antisemitic.”

BBC RADIO: “Frankly, there’s been an attempt to smear Jeremy Corbyn and his associates as anti-Semitic from the moment he became leader. The simple fact is we have the right to criticise what is one of the most brutal regimes going in the way it treats the Palestinians.”

Home Affairs Select Committee: “They are out to get Jeremy Corbyn and that is why they whipped up this hysteria about antisemitism… If you actually look, the MPs who smeared me about antisemitism have been criticising Jeremy Corbyn and stabbing him in the back for the last nine months on a whole series of issues.”

BBC RADIO: “As I’ve said, I’ve never heard anybody say anything anti-Semitic, but there’s been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as antisemitic. I had to put up with 35 years of this...”