HITLER AND THE NAZIS’ ANTI-ZIONISM
Hitler and the Nazis’ Anti-Zionism
by Jeffrey Herf
Jeffrey Herf, author of the award winning book ‘Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust’, and Professor of History at the University of Maryland, examines the historical inaccuracies behind ex-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s charge that ‘Hitler was a Zionist’. This week Cambridge University Press has published his new book, Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989.
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During the Cold War the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact Allies and the Western far-left spread a variety of lies about the history of Zionism, the most famous of these falsehoods being the assertion that Hitler and the Nazi regime were supporters of Zionism. It was a falsehood that fit well with another big lie of Communist Cold War propaganda, namely that Zionism was itself a form of racism. If the latter were the case, it would make logical sense that racists such as Hitler supported Zionism. The fact is however that Hitler and the Nazis despised Zionism and did all they could to defeat it.
Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London and a long-standing prominent figure on the British left, has now repeated the myth of Nazi support for Zionism. However, what was a required and standard slogan of the Communist regimes, parties and the Western far-left during the Cold War, now faces opposition from some members of the British Labour Party. That a man as prominent as Livingstone, whom the citizens of London elected as their Mayor for eight years, repeats such rubbish says a great deal about the ideas that have been circulating in what presents itself as a major cosmopolitan city. At least parts of Britain’s left have sunk to the status of a provincial intellectual backwater. Livingstone and those who agree with him are oblivious of the following well-established historical facts.
First, 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 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. By the late 1930s the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later collaborated with the Nazis in wartime Berlin, had informed German diplomats stationed in Jerusalem that the entry of Jews into Palestine from Germany was angering local Arabs. For reasons of their own, the Nazis cut off Jewish emigration in 1941 to pursue their goal of murdering Europe’s Jews. 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.
Second, Livingstone displays an ignorance of the history of World War II in North Africa. In November 1941, Hitler promised the Mufti, then in Berlin, that if and when the German armies were successful in the Caucuses, they would drive south to destroy the Jewish population then living in areas controlled by Britain in North Africa and the Middle East. In the summer and autumn of 1942, German General Erwin Rommel’s Afrikakorps drove east from Tunisia to be met by forces from Australia, New Zealand and Britain at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt. Nazi propaganda in those weeks and months urged Arab listeners to “kill the Jews,” dispensing with any distinctions between Zionists and Jews. As the German historians Martin Cuppers and Klaus Michael Mallman have demonstrated in Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews of Palestine, it was only the Allied victory at El Alamein over Rommel’s forces that prevented the arrival of SS units eager to carry out mass murders of Jews in North Africa and Mandatory Palestine. Livingstone appears unfamiliar with this glorious page in the history of British anti-fascism.
While actions speak louder than words, Nazi propaganda aimed both at German audiences and at Arabs in North Africa and the Middle East constantly denounced Britain, the Jews and Zionism. This Nazi flood of anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish hatred is documented in my book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, which the leaders of the Labour Party really ought to read. Nazi propagandists claimed that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a “Vatican for the Jews,” that is a power centre of an international Jewish conspiracy and thus a threat to Germany. They also argued that an Allied victory would be a victory for the Jews. They repeated lies that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a threat to the religion of Islam in the entire Arab Middle East. Zionism was described as a form of “Jewish imperialism” that was linked to British and American imperialism, and even to “Jewish Bolshevism” in Moscow as well. In the postwar years, neo-Nazis and Islamists in the Middle East viewed the establishment of the state of Israel as confirming these Nazi anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In short, in both word and deed, Nazi Germany did all it could to ensure that a Jewish state in Palestine never would emerge.
Livingstone appears ill-informed about the decisive role that British anti-fascism in World War II played in defeating Nazi Germany’s efforts to murder the almost one million Jews of North Africa and the Middle East. One of the great successes of the Cold War propaganda campaigns waged by the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact allies, Arab states most hostile to Israel as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization was its suppression of the actual history of Nazi anti-Zionism and even the role the Soviet Union played in helping to defeat it. In the immediate postwar years, before Soviet leaders sought to drive out Western influence in the Middle East and gain control over Western Europe’s supply of oil from the region, the Soviet Union supported the establishment of the state of Israel. After the “anti-cosmopolitan purges” of the early 1950s, the history of Soviet Zionism became as embarrassing as the actual history of Nazi anti-Zionism. Neither fit into the dogmas of Communist anti-imperialism which, it appears, have now filtered into some ranks of the Labour Party.
Anti-Semitism, like all forms or racism and religious hatred, is built on lies and distortions about the past and present. Around the world, London stands for worldliness, cosmopolitanism and often for an understanding of history. When the former Mayor of this city reveals how little he knows about World War II and Britain’s role in it, one has to wonder what has happened to the qualities we admire in British intellectual life.BACK
COMMENTS
JANE
May 3, 2016 at 4:38 pm
What is so disturbing about this is the fact that the Livingstone lobbyists are now accusing his critics of deploying ‘smears’ in an effort to undemine Cor yn’s leadership:Diane Abbott made this claim recently in a BBC interview.
And Livingstone still refuses to apologise.
What a depressing spectacle this is :the Labour party’s continuing reluctance to acknowledge and tackle the embedded distortions and myths which are sustaining its ‘anti-Zionist’ activists.
Can the party survive in its present state; can the moderates, typified by John Mann, ever find common ground with the innr circle of extreme leftists?
How can such a party ever hope to govern the UK?
ISAAC ANDREW BANGURA
May 3, 2016 at 7:18 pm
Yeah! Its still surprises me for a man of such a noble standing in the British political establishment to join the ranks of those people who use public offices to promote antisemitism. The good news is that, they will fail as it is happening now, coz the truth is of a higher scale than falsehood and the weight of the truth will descend on those who promote falsehood like a falling bricks. May God continuing to save Israel and the Jewish people from both low and high profile anti Semite.
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DE POURBAIX
May 4, 2016 at 7:45 pm
I am not political, but please do not take Mr Ken Livingstone’s comments, seemingly based on flawed historic representations and understanding, as an expression of British intellectual life.
Your measured arguments and the historic facts you cite in support speak for themselves. To suggest that Hitler and his regime that killed millions of Jews, actually supported Zionism is plainly absurd.
It leads me to question as to why a former mayor and prominent politician is voicing such opinions? What and whom is he supporting?
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_NO1
May 6, 2016 at 9:26 pm
Sorry, but this is a typical snake oil salesman’s pitch. The author is wrong, and it’s a shame if he didn’t know it, before putting down such a piece of proto-hasbara.
Regards from a jewish Iraeli,
Robert
DAVID PALMER
May 8, 2016 at 5:09 pm
Dear Jeffrey,
This is excellent but here you write:
“In the immediate postwar years, before Soviet leaders sought to drive out Western influence in the Middle East and gain control over Western Europe’s supply of oil from the region, the Soviet Union supported the establishment of the state of Israel.”
However it is well-established that Soviet support for Isreal’s creation was also undertaken with the objective of undermining British influence in the region, and to excerbate ‘inter-imperialist’ differences between the UK and USA(see G. Gorodetsky, The Soviet Union and the Creation of the State of Israel, 2001). In April 1947 the Soviets unexpectedly shifted their position to backing the UN partition plan. (this was one of Stalin’s earliest diplomatic responses to the announcement of Truman doctrine in March 1947) and then to gave concrete support to the establishment of Israel. The objective of undermining Western influence in the region was the same both when the SU (briefly, but critically) supported Israel formation, and later when it allied with the Arab nationalist regimes to oppose it.
Regards.
David Palmer
GEOFF SHORT
June 19, 2016 at 8:31 am
You write, correctly, that the murder of Europe’s Jews was a great blow to Zionism. Livingstone, however, argues that Hitler was only supportive of Zionism “before he went mad” and decided to murder the Jews.
MELANIE VAN KAMPEN
September 15, 2016 at 5:04 pm
I have tried for over 1 1/2 years to reach someone outside of the SC/GA local, state, and FBI and all communications are blocked or the people have been contacted and told cover up lies and/or presented with falsified documentations and fabricated documentations and deterred from believing the truth. This will be the most horrific and yet easiest to prove case of SS Nazi thriving in SC and using a fake investigation with a corrupt attorney and, I believe lead investigators from SLED and the Lexington County Sheriff’s department in SC at the core. Please get this to someone who is an expert in tracking these incidents and understanding that this is exactly who would be trying to expose it, how it would sound, and how it would be covered up. Everything is fabricated, and everything exactly follows the themes and tactics and general strategy of manipulation of the SS Nazi.Everyone is a victim. I have been poisoned long term with furfuryl alochol and other chemicals, drugged, raped, and people enter my condo and car daily to vandalize and put poisons-like on my mattress and elsewhere. People who want to come forward, realizing something is very wrong, are afraid…this, again will be the easiest case, taken directly from the SS Nazi manual for organization and application of tactics-I have a day to day proof of all of it.
Melanie van Kampen
I visit Whole Foods regularly on the island, the Hilton Head Library, I live at Hilton Head Beach an Tennis on Folly Field Rd., frequent the Northridge Movie theatre, and sometimes Barnes and Noble. I drive a silver Volvo. The local sheriff’s department will not help, but I still believe everyone is a victim.I do not use email. But, I am here living everyday being tortured and slowly murdered by SS Nazi’s. I have left around 1000 internet correspondences such as this, but it would be interesting to find out how many were interfered with or blocked. Anyone who knows how to check the similar pics section of Google and back date for a number of months will find all the pics were substitued with horrible SS Nazi images, someone who understands what they are looking at. The local FBI and the Sheriff’s department refused to admit it as evidence even though I sent an email to the FBI site-nothing would be done and I was asked to leave the office after the gentleman talking to me, following orders from the lead Nazi in this, told him to leave me sitting there and refuse to help me. I have so much more that has never been exposed before, follows exactly, and the reason, I believe was to give a go at seeing how many thousands of people could be manipulated-had nothing to do with me other than to be a person to dehumanize so that the higher goal of manipulating could be tested. Yes, Nazism is alive and thriving in the deep south, from the Neo-Nazi’s to those of the SS in higher positions of authority and power to do all this. So easy to prove, to stop, to educate others in the US and the world. People who have committed suicide or had accidents under this attorney’s investigations have very likely died by murder from these Nazi’s. I have been told that should anything happen to me, everyone would think it was suicide. Another …same threat but with “accident”.
Melanie van Kampen
MICHAEL MILLS
September 21, 2016 at 1:07 pm
Professor Herf distorts historical fact in this article. To be sure Hitler did not support the creation of a Jewish state, and it is correct that he believed that Jews were a parasitic people incapable of building a state where they would live by their own labour.
However he did not oppose the settlement of Jews in Palestine, since he was in favour of their settling anywhere in the world outside Germany and Europe. To that end he approved of the cooperation of Heydrich’s SS and police agencies with the World Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency for Palestine for the purpose of facilitating Jewish migration from Germany to Palestine, including by illegal and clandestine means.
British Military Intelligence was well aware that the German Gestapo was organising and financing illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine.
It was the German Foreign Office, which was a conservative rather than a radical National Socialist entity, that opposed the immigration of Jews into Palestine, since in its view that would lead to the creation of a “Jewish Vatican” that could interfere in other countries on behalf of the Jews living in them.
In 1938 the German Foreign Office asked Hitler to prevent the emigration of German Jews to Palestine for the above reason. The historian Francis Nicosia has shown how Hitler decided to permit Heydrich to continue to organise Jewish migration to Palestine, since in his mind the present real imperative of getting the Jews out of Germany greatly outweighed the potential future danger of a Jewish state, which he considered unlikely because the British would want to keep Palestine as part of their Empire and therefore keep the Jews living there under control.
Professor Herf also repeats the hoary old canards about German-Arab cooperation to exterminate the Jews of Palestine and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa. In fact, as David Motadel demonstrates in his recent book “Islam and Nazi Germany’s War”, Hitler’s sole aim was to gain Arab and Muslim support for Germany’s war against both Britain and the Soviet Union, and that his promises to Haj Amin al-Husseini were worthless since he regarded the Middle East and North Africa as being an Italian sphere of influence and had no intention of intervening there. Dr Motadel specifically rejects the attempt by Netanyahu and other Jewish activists to defame the Palestinians and Muslims more generally by linking them to the extermination of European Jews by the wartime German Government.
MEATHEAD
April 4, 2017 at 8:20 pm
I am slightly lost. Livingstone’s comments explicitly addressed the Haavara agreement signed by the Nazi government which facilitated the relocation of some Jews to Palestine in 1933. He also explicitly cited Lenni Brenner’s discredited book Zionism in the Age of Dictators. This piece, on the other hand, only addresses Hitler in 1941 and after, which Livingstone was not talking about. Brenner’s book is routinely cited by Holocaust deniers and in no way deserves to be taken seriously. But given that this is supposed to be a scholarly response to Livingstone’s loathsome comments, it seems odd to have it directed against something Livingstone clearly didn’t say. The piece talks about “lies and distortions about the past and present.” It might be splitting hairs, but it is a distortion to say that Livingstone was talking about 1941 and after. And whatever one imagines Hitler’s intentions were in 1933, that is clearly well before the Holocaust started, and it’s unfair to act as if Livingstone was talking about the Holocaust.
For a piece that closely addresses Brenner’s discredited work and explains exactly how Livingston attempted to use it–in other words does what this piece seems to want to do–see http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ken-livingstone-hitler-zionism-and-the-misuse-of-history/.
BILL MCLAREN
April 4, 2017 at 8:37 pm
“While (after robbing them of most of their possessions) the Nazis did allow some German Jews to leave the country in the 1930s 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.”
In that one sentence the author has basically said Livingston is correct as he has AFAIK made no claim that Hitler supported the Zionist beyond the early 1930’s. 90% of this article deals with late 30’s and 40’s and, while factually correct, is of no relevance to what Livingston talked about.
NB I am making no claims regarding the statements by Livingston, I simply do not have the information to know who is correct. However this article reads as being an attack on Livingston using emotionally charged and disturbing but irrelevant facts.
ADAM
April 5, 2017 at 1:42 am
“Nazi propagandists claimed that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a “Vatican for the Jews,” that is a power centre of an international Jewish conspiracy and thus a threat to Germany. They also argued that an Allied victory would be a victory for the Jews. They repeated lies that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a threat to the religion of Islam in the entire Arab Middle East”
Well they weren’t that far off. The Greater Israel project. Mayhem in the Middle East, driven out into Europe. Leaving Israel to tidy up conveniently.
Almost seems like it was planned(!)
SANDY
April 5, 2017 at 7:39 am
Just reading this article, I take note that Liningstone’s comment was very specific 1932/33 not later. Therefore it does appear that his comment was accurate since it is not the opinion behind an act, ….
Did Zionist movement get support to go to Palestine?…..answer…… Yes.
The merit of this support and motivation can be seen in hindsight…. But support was there, however devious…..who is to say that Livingstone’s comment ” until Hitler went mad” is not exactly what happened.
Livingstone’s comment here proves his ethic that such murder is madness.
Personal opinion , one person alone does not achieve such vast monstrous acts, it takes more, it is sad to say, anyone observing and not preventing, is equally guilty.
The point…. Help to go was given, accurate, motive… A different story
NICK
April 5, 2017 at 8:54 am
Mr livingstone has repeatedly stated the comment he made was in reference to hitlers beliefs “in the early 1930’s, before he went mad”. Your article contains one paragraph only in relation to the early 1930s. The rest of what you have written is not relevant to livingstones comments but possibly to your book. Talking about livingstone’s lack of knowledge of world war 2, whether accurate or not, is irrelevant. He did not make any comment on world war 2. I am not passing an opinon on his comments or their accuracy. I am highlighting the fact this piece doesnt address his comments in any kind of depth or accuracy itself. Ironic really given he is accused of inaccuracy.
BOB SYKES
April 5, 2017 at 10:34 am
If he’d said that Balfour supported Zionism would there have been any outrage?
BOB SYKES
April 5, 2017 at 10:47 am
“For a time the Nazi program of making Germany Judenrein (clean of Jews) and the Zionist policy of seeking olim (immigrants) coincided.”
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/haavara
YECHIEL LEVIN
April 5, 2017 at 12:10 pm
However true or false Livingstone’s contentions, the argument as to their truth misses the point entirely. To Leftists like Red Ken, there is no truth or falsehood, only rhetoric in the service of a cause. The linkage of Hitler to Zionism has one goal and one goal only: the linking of Donald Trump, and the American right more generally, despite their strong support of and for Israel, to Nazis and Nazism.
PATRICK BONNER
April 5, 2017 at 1:36 pm
I appreciate this article examining the real reasons for Hitler’s tacit support for the migration of some German Jews to the Middle East. Historical accuracy has been lost in the quagmire of the anti-Semitism debate within the Labour Party and the British mass media. It would be helpful, however, if the clear definition of Hitler’s dire intentions with respect to German Jews, which the British Labour Movement, then and now, diligently condemns and fights against, was reciprocated in the definition of Zionism and what constitutes anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
Listening to and reading literature from the Jewish Socialist Group I believe that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not one and the same thing. A Jew, as well as a socialist, can be anti-Zionist while not being anti-Semitic. However, the Jewish media, reflecting the modern Zionist requirement to do all possible to defend Israel, condemns all anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism in order to divert all criticism away from Israel in relation to the Palestinian question. While the press is full of the issues surrounding the Labour Party and alleged anti-Semitism the Jewish state is busy continuing to illegally expropriate land from the Palestinians in order to populate those lands with Jewish settlers. That this expropriation is seen to be justified by the Chief Rabbi, the Jewish Labour Party and, because there is no overt criticism, by the right of the Labour Party, is even sadder than the clumsy and mistaken utterances of one of the most overt anti-racists in the country – Ken Livingstone.
For Tom Watson, his agenda is to whittle away support for the Jeremy Corbyn leadership; for the Chief Rabbi his agenda is to defend the Israeli state, its continued expansion into remaining Palestinian territories and to undermine the Labour Party among British Jews; for the press and mass media, their agenda, as always, is to undermine and defeat anyone who represents a real challenge to the hegemony of the capitalist system and their privileged existence in society.
When the inevitable crisis of capitalism again reaches its zenith (as predicted by a great scholar of Jewish origin) and the naked aggression of the right extremists is once again threatening society, it will be those who today are being condemned as anti-Semitic who will step up to the plate to challenge real anti-Semitism and racism.
If Labour are in dispute with each other at this stage it is because the skulduggery and tangential attacks by the Labour right make the defence of each and every socialist in the Labour Party an overarching requirement to stem and defeat the attacks by the Labour right and the use by the right (as with the mass media) of each and every issue to achieve their aims.
Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters will try not to be dragged into these issues which in many cases are known about long before but saved only to be released at the moment and in a way to maximise their effect. In this case the Ken Livingstone issue has contributed to the diversion of the issues away from the continued expropriation of Palestinian land by the Israeli state, a success you might say for the Zionist agenda.
TERRY LEE
April 5, 2017 at 2:48 pm
Thank you Jeffrey, An excellent historical explaination of the 3rd Reichs view of Zionism and it’s actions towards it. I’m surprised the ex-mayor pouts this dogma. We would, surely, hope he is perfectly capable of checking facts before spouting such false rhetoric, unless of course he has another agenda. Either his party or the the law should act, or of course both.
GLYN JONES
April 5, 2017 at 5:51 pm
Livingstone is talking utter rubbish, but what is worth noting is the media’s reaction, they are all piling in slating livingstone , slating the Labour Party for not expelling livingstone, but they never praise Corbyn or the Labour Party for fighting the injustice that the tories are pouring on the vulnerable, underfunding the NHS since 2010, causing poverty and children having to go to school without breakfast because of benefit cuts, it’s about time the media stopped supporting the tories and got behind Corbyn and the Labour Party who are fighting the Tory injustice.
SJ COOMBS
April 5, 2017 at 9:46 pm
What ever makes you believe that Livingstone can be classed as an intellectual?
MIKE
April 5, 2017 at 10:29 pm
This article peddles the same nonsensical historical distortions that help fuel antisemetism around the world.
To state the same rubbish discredited rhetoric used the bibi netenyahu, about the grand mufti of Jerusalem and his collaboration with the Nazis just further delegitimizes this author. It is ironic because everyone seems to deflect the real question here. Which is how the world can sit by and watch Israel commit atrocities against the Palestinian people for over 50 years on the basis of religious zealotry and do absolutely nothing about it while strolling around propagating this notion of having the moral high ground.
Utter nonsense.
JAMES EDWARDS
April 6, 2017 at 12:20 pm
Great, fascinating article. But an odd concluding thought. City mayors (and politicians in general) are not known for their intellectualism. It’s akin to looking at Trump and despairing at the ignorance of Ivy League professors.
EDWARD SOLOMON
April 6, 2017 at 2:39 pm
The worst part of this debacle is that the entire premise of Livingstone’s historical revisionism is to directly link the demise of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis with the creation of the State of Israel and forge a collaborative connection between Hitler’s Nazi party and the Zionist movement, thereby making the Jews agents in their own demise and placing them on a level with the Nazis because they, as he puts it, drove out 700,000 Palestinian Arabs at gunpoint (also a complete falsification).
It is bordering on Holocaust denial and it is a grave offence to history that his lies go unchecked by reporter after reporter, who collectively fail to hold hi
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JOHN C
April 16, 2017 at 1:01 pm
Except I don’t think Livingston would disagree with any of the history you refer to. The only comments he made were regarding an opportunistic cooperation in 1933-34 by some strange bedfellows, never alleging any common purpose. For this he has been demonised and long after any memory of what he actually said has been forgotten anyone who speaks in his support is tarred with the same brush, and any attempt he makes to defend himself is added to the roster of his sin. There are enough genuine and enthusiastic antisemites in the world without the need for invention.
MATT SCOTT
April 16, 2017 at 11:36 pm
None of this otherwise excellent article actually contradicts anything that Livingstone said, except the accusation that Livinstone claimed “Hitler was a Zionist”. He has vehemently denied expressing that opinion.
B.A. FREEMAN
January 10, 2018 at 9:31 pm
mr. herf, what makes U think that mr. livingstone is ignorant of history? my take on the matter is that anybody who can reach the mayoralty of london is *anything* but stupid; instead, his stance is but another example of the hard-left practice of the Big Lie. we need to remember to whom he is speaking: the product of british public schools. the average briton is nominally leftist upon entry to the workforce and adulthood, but only because he has stewed in a leftist sauce for at least a decade; he has been taught leftist platitudes in leiu of critical thinking, and has never been exposed to opposing positions. in other words, mr. livingstone is lying to the man in the street.
i suppose that it is possible that mr. livingstone is as deluded as those whom he is addressing, but i suspect that he knows very well what he is saying. if one has not been taught history, the words of an authority figure can often convince one of the veracity of the words – hence, the Big Lie. so why would he lie? what benefit is there in misleading the public about history? the answer is that the hard left is incapable of winning elections, because the changes for which it calls are unpalatable to the electorate. the hard left learned well in the last century that when society is collapsing, it is much easier for them to seize control. thus, if they *force* society into collapse, they can seize control.
so how can they do that? given that parliament has been quite leftist compared to non-european parliamentary bodies, regardless of the party affiliations of the ruling groups, it’s a simple matter to declare martial law when the ordinary business of everyday life can no longer be conducted due to the violence of pious (salafi, or “like muhammed and the first muslims”) muslims. pious muslims are a sort of proxy army for the left; no matter how bad the attacks of pious muslims, nobody will suspect that the left is complicit in them. once martial law is declared, all it takes is an assassination or 50 to seize control; that’s *far* easier than a forced “revolution” by a Red Brigades type group.
show me that mr. livingstone is simply mistaken, and i’ll believe that his statement was a mistake; otherwise, i’ll use occam’s razor and find that he is quite knowledgeable – and treasonous.
AYATOLLAH GHILMEINI
January 18, 2018 at 8:27 pm
This is an exceptional piece of scholarship on a topical subject that needed exactly this treatment.
Sadly, for anti-Zionists, this puts them back where they do not want to be, espousing the same ideas and objectives as Hitler when they prefer to pursue his goals using his methods while slandering the Zionism with the Hitler brush.
As for the risible Livingstone, his alliance with anti-Zionists is of the same color of a previous anti-Zionist alliance, the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact.
PD
April 27, 2018 at 5:19 pm
But what was the Haavara Agreement? I thought that was what Ken was referring to.
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TONY GREENSTEIN
May 12, 2022 at 11:49 pm
Professor Herf’s states that ‘The fact is however that Hitler and the Nazis despised Zionism and did all they could to defeat it.’
This is simply untrue. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (p.41) that:
‘a great movement called Zionism arose among them.’ However his anti-Semitism dictated that the Jews must be engaged in political chicanery.
‘They [the Zionists] have not the slightest intention of building up a Jewish State in Palestine so as to live in it. What they really are aiming at is to establish a central organization for their international swindling and cheating.’
I am surprised that the good professor hasn’t bothered to study such a basic text as Mein Kampf.
To give but 2 examples the late David Cesarani, who I hope isn’t going to be accused of antisemitism wrote in his final and by far his best book, ‘The Final Solution’ that:
‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.’
Similarly Yf’att Weiss described how Nazi Germany ‘gave free rein to isolationist [i.e. Zionist] Jewish organizations and clearly preferred them to assimilationist German-Jewish entities.’
Yf’att Weiss, The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement, p.30.
It would be tedious to quote other respected pro-Zionist historians such as Lucy Dawidowicz and Francis Nicosia to the same effect. By his wild and hysterical rhetoric Professor Herf simply abandons all objectivity becoming instead a political partisan.
It is indisputable that on 28 January 1935 Heydrich, who was the ‘real engineer of the final solution’ issued a directive stating:
the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership…. (they are) not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organisations (assimilationists).’
Dawidowicz quotes this in her War Against the Jews p.118 and Nicosia in Zionism and Antisemitism, p.119. There are many more instances of such favouritism. Why deny it?
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Hitler and the Nazis’ Anti-Zionism
by Jeffrey Herf
Jeffrey Herf, author of the award winning book ‘Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust’, and Professor of History at the University of Maryland, examines the historical inaccuracies behind ex-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone’s charge that ‘Hitler was a Zionist’. This week Cambridge University Press has published his new book, Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989.
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During the Cold War the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact Allies and the Western far-left spread a variety of lies about the history of Zionism, the most famous of these falsehoods being the assertion that Hitler and the Nazi regime were supporters of Zionism. It was a falsehood that fit well with another big lie of Communist Cold War propaganda, namely that Zionism was itself a form of racism. If the latter were the case, it would make logical sense that racists such as Hitler supported Zionism. The fact is however that Hitler and the Nazis despised Zionism and did all they could to defeat it.
Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London and a long-standing prominent figure on the British left, has now repeated the myth of Nazi support for Zionism. However, what was a required and standard slogan of the Communist regimes, parties and the Western far-left during the Cold War, now faces opposition from some members of the British Labour Party. That a man as prominent as Livingstone, whom the citizens of London elected as their Mayor for eight years, repeats such rubbish says a great deal about the ideas that have been circulating in what presents itself as a major cosmopolitan city. At least parts of Britain’s left have sunk to the status of a provincial intellectual backwater. Livingstone and those who agree with him are oblivious of the following well-established historical facts.
First, 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 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. By the late 1930s the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later collaborated with the Nazis in wartime Berlin, had informed German diplomats stationed in Jerusalem that the entry of Jews into Palestine from Germany was angering local Arabs. For reasons of their own, the Nazis cut off Jewish emigration in 1941 to pursue their goal of murdering Europe’s Jews. 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.
Second, Livingstone displays an ignorance of the history of World War II in North Africa. In November 1941, Hitler promised the Mufti, then in Berlin, that if and when the German armies were successful in the Caucuses, they would drive south to destroy the Jewish population then living in areas controlled by Britain in North Africa and the Middle East. In the summer and autumn of 1942, German General Erwin Rommel’s Afrikakorps drove east from Tunisia to be met by forces from Australia, New Zealand and Britain at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt. Nazi propaganda in those weeks and months urged Arab listeners to “kill the Jews,” dispensing with any distinctions between Zionists and Jews. As the German historians Martin Cuppers and Klaus Michael Mallman have demonstrated in Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews of Palestine, it was only the Allied victory at El Alamein over Rommel’s forces that prevented the arrival of SS units eager to carry out mass murders of Jews in North Africa and Mandatory Palestine. Livingstone appears unfamiliar with this glorious page in the history of British anti-fascism.
While actions speak louder than words, Nazi propaganda aimed both at German audiences and at Arabs in North Africa and the Middle East constantly denounced Britain, the Jews and Zionism. This Nazi flood of anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish hatred is documented in my book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, which the leaders of the Labour Party really ought to read. Nazi propagandists claimed that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a “Vatican for the Jews,” that is a power centre of an international Jewish conspiracy and thus a threat to Germany. They also argued that an Allied victory would be a victory for the Jews. They repeated lies that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a threat to the religion of Islam in the entire Arab Middle East. Zionism was described as a form of “Jewish imperialism” that was linked to British and American imperialism, and even to “Jewish Bolshevism” in Moscow as well. In the postwar years, neo-Nazis and Islamists in the Middle East viewed the establishment of the state of Israel as confirming these Nazi anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In short, in both word and deed, Nazi Germany did all it could to ensure that a Jewish state in Palestine never would emerge.
Livingstone appears ill-informed about the decisive role that British anti-fascism in World War II played in defeating Nazi Germany’s efforts to murder the almost one million Jews of North Africa and the Middle East. One of the great successes of the Cold War propaganda campaigns waged by the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact allies, Arab states most hostile to Israel as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization was its suppression of the actual history of Nazi anti-Zionism and even the role the Soviet Union played in helping to defeat it. In the immediate postwar years, before Soviet leaders sought to drive out Western influence in the Middle East and gain control over Western Europe’s supply of oil from the region, the Soviet Union supported the establishment of the state of Israel. After the “anti-cosmopolitan purges” of the early 1950s, the history of Soviet Zionism became as embarrassing as the actual history of Nazi anti-Zionism. Neither fit into the dogmas of Communist anti-imperialism which, it appears, have now filtered into some ranks of the Labour Party.
Anti-Semitism, like all forms or racism and religious hatred, is built on lies and distortions about the past and present. Around the world, London stands for worldliness, cosmopolitanism and often for an understanding of history. When the former Mayor of this city reveals how little he knows about World War II and Britain’s role in it, one has to wonder what has happened to the qualities we admire in British intellectual life.BACK
COMMENTS
JANE
May 3, 2016 at 4:38 pm
What is so disturbing about this is the fact that the Livingstone lobbyists are now accusing his critics of deploying ‘smears’ in an effort to undemine Cor yn’s leadership:Diane Abbott made this claim recently in a BBC interview.
And Livingstone still refuses to apologise.
What a depressing spectacle this is :the Labour party’s continuing reluctance to acknowledge and tackle the embedded distortions and myths which are sustaining its ‘anti-Zionist’ activists.
Can the party survive in its present state; can the moderates, typified by John Mann, ever find common ground with the innr circle of extreme leftists?
How can such a party ever hope to govern the UK?
ISAAC ANDREW BANGURA
May 3, 2016 at 7:18 pm
Yeah! Its still surprises me for a man of such a noble standing in the British political establishment to join the ranks of those people who use public offices to promote antisemitism. The good news is that, they will fail as it is happening now, coz the truth is of a higher scale than falsehood and the weight of the truth will descend on those who promote falsehood like a falling bricks. May God continuing to save Israel and the Jewish people from both low and high profile anti Semite.
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DE POURBAIX
May 4, 2016 at 7:45 pm
I am not political, but please do not take Mr Ken Livingstone’s comments, seemingly based on flawed historic representations and understanding, as an expression of British intellectual life.
Your measured arguments and the historic facts you cite in support speak for themselves. To suggest that Hitler and his regime that killed millions of Jews, actually supported Zionism is plainly absurd.
It leads me to question as to why a former mayor and prominent politician is voicing such opinions? What and whom is he supporting?
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_NO1
May 6, 2016 at 9:26 pm
Sorry, but this is a typical snake oil salesman’s pitch. The author is wrong, and it’s a shame if he didn’t know it, before putting down such a piece of proto-hasbara.
Regards from a jewish Iraeli,
Robert
DAVID PALMER
May 8, 2016 at 5:09 pm
Dear Jeffrey,
This is excellent but here you write:
“In the immediate postwar years, before Soviet leaders sought to drive out Western influence in the Middle East and gain control over Western Europe’s supply of oil from the region, the Soviet Union supported the establishment of the state of Israel.”
However it is well-established that Soviet support for Isreal’s creation was also undertaken with the objective of undermining British influence in the region, and to excerbate ‘inter-imperialist’ differences between the UK and USA(see G. Gorodetsky, The Soviet Union and the Creation of the State of Israel, 2001). In April 1947 the Soviets unexpectedly shifted their position to backing the UN partition plan. (this was one of Stalin’s earliest diplomatic responses to the announcement of Truman doctrine in March 1947) and then to gave concrete support to the establishment of Israel. The objective of undermining Western influence in the region was the same both when the SU (briefly, but critically) supported Israel formation, and later when it allied with the Arab nationalist regimes to oppose it.
Regards.
David Palmer
GEOFF SHORT
June 19, 2016 at 8:31 am
You write, correctly, that the murder of Europe’s Jews was a great blow to Zionism. Livingstone, however, argues that Hitler was only supportive of Zionism “before he went mad” and decided to murder the Jews.
MELANIE VAN KAMPEN
September 15, 2016 at 5:04 pm
I have tried for over 1 1/2 years to reach someone outside of the SC/GA local, state, and FBI and all communications are blocked or the people have been contacted and told cover up lies and/or presented with falsified documentations and fabricated documentations and deterred from believing the truth. This will be the most horrific and yet easiest to prove case of SS Nazi thriving in SC and using a fake investigation with a corrupt attorney and, I believe lead investigators from SLED and the Lexington County Sheriff’s department in SC at the core. Please get this to someone who is an expert in tracking these incidents and understanding that this is exactly who would be trying to expose it, how it would sound, and how it would be covered up. Everything is fabricated, and everything exactly follows the themes and tactics and general strategy of manipulation of the SS Nazi.Everyone is a victim. I have been poisoned long term with furfuryl alochol and other chemicals, drugged, raped, and people enter my condo and car daily to vandalize and put poisons-like on my mattress and elsewhere. People who want to come forward, realizing something is very wrong, are afraid…this, again will be the easiest case, taken directly from the SS Nazi manual for organization and application of tactics-I have a day to day proof of all of it.
Melanie van Kampen
I visit Whole Foods regularly on the island, the Hilton Head Library, I live at Hilton Head Beach an Tennis on Folly Field Rd., frequent the Northridge Movie theatre, and sometimes Barnes and Noble. I drive a silver Volvo. The local sheriff’s department will not help, but I still believe everyone is a victim.I do not use email. But, I am here living everyday being tortured and slowly murdered by SS Nazi’s. I have left around 1000 internet correspondences such as this, but it would be interesting to find out how many were interfered with or blocked. Anyone who knows how to check the similar pics section of Google and back date for a number of months will find all the pics were substitued with horrible SS Nazi images, someone who understands what they are looking at. The local FBI and the Sheriff’s department refused to admit it as evidence even though I sent an email to the FBI site-nothing would be done and I was asked to leave the office after the gentleman talking to me, following orders from the lead Nazi in this, told him to leave me sitting there and refuse to help me. I have so much more that has never been exposed before, follows exactly, and the reason, I believe was to give a go at seeing how many thousands of people could be manipulated-had nothing to do with me other than to be a person to dehumanize so that the higher goal of manipulating could be tested. Yes, Nazism is alive and thriving in the deep south, from the Neo-Nazi’s to those of the SS in higher positions of authority and power to do all this. So easy to prove, to stop, to educate others in the US and the world. People who have committed suicide or had accidents under this attorney’s investigations have very likely died by murder from these Nazi’s. I have been told that should anything happen to me, everyone would think it was suicide. Another …same threat but with “accident”.
Melanie van Kampen
MICHAEL MILLS
September 21, 2016 at 1:07 pm
Professor Herf distorts historical fact in this article. To be sure Hitler did not support the creation of a Jewish state, and it is correct that he believed that Jews were a parasitic people incapable of building a state where they would live by their own labour.
However he did not oppose the settlement of Jews in Palestine, since he was in favour of their settling anywhere in the world outside Germany and Europe. To that end he approved of the cooperation of Heydrich’s SS and police agencies with the World Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency for Palestine for the purpose of facilitating Jewish migration from Germany to Palestine, including by illegal and clandestine means.
British Military Intelligence was well aware that the German Gestapo was organising and financing illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine.
It was the German Foreign Office, which was a conservative rather than a radical National Socialist entity, that opposed the immigration of Jews into Palestine, since in its view that would lead to the creation of a “Jewish Vatican” that could interfere in other countries on behalf of the Jews living in them.
In 1938 the German Foreign Office asked Hitler to prevent the emigration of German Jews to Palestine for the above reason. The historian Francis Nicosia has shown how Hitler decided to permit Heydrich to continue to organise Jewish migration to Palestine, since in his mind the present real imperative of getting the Jews out of Germany greatly outweighed the potential future danger of a Jewish state, which he considered unlikely because the British would want to keep Palestine as part of their Empire and therefore keep the Jews living there under control.
Professor Herf also repeats the hoary old canards about German-Arab cooperation to exterminate the Jews of Palestine and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa. In fact, as David Motadel demonstrates in his recent book “Islam and Nazi Germany’s War”, Hitler’s sole aim was to gain Arab and Muslim support for Germany’s war against both Britain and the Soviet Union, and that his promises to Haj Amin al-Husseini were worthless since he regarded the Middle East and North Africa as being an Italian sphere of influence and had no intention of intervening there. Dr Motadel specifically rejects the attempt by Netanyahu and other Jewish activists to defame the Palestinians and Muslims more generally by linking them to the extermination of European Jews by the wartime German Government.
MEATHEAD
April 4, 2017 at 8:20 pm
I am slightly lost. Livingstone’s comments explicitly addressed the Haavara agreement signed by the Nazi government which facilitated the relocation of some Jews to Palestine in 1933. He also explicitly cited Lenni Brenner’s discredited book Zionism in the Age of Dictators. This piece, on the other hand, only addresses Hitler in 1941 and after, which Livingstone was not talking about. Brenner’s book is routinely cited by Holocaust deniers and in no way deserves to be taken seriously. But given that this is supposed to be a scholarly response to Livingstone’s loathsome comments, it seems odd to have it directed against something Livingstone clearly didn’t say. The piece talks about “lies and distortions about the past and present.” It might be splitting hairs, but it is a distortion to say that Livingstone was talking about 1941 and after. And whatever one imagines Hitler’s intentions were in 1933, that is clearly well before the Holocaust started, and it’s unfair to act as if Livingstone was talking about the Holocaust.
For a piece that closely addresses Brenner’s discredited work and explains exactly how Livingston attempted to use it–in other words does what this piece seems to want to do–see http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ken-livingstone-hitler-zionism-and-the-misuse-of-history/.
BILL MCLAREN
April 4, 2017 at 8:37 pm
“While (after robbing them of most of their possessions) the Nazis did allow some German Jews to leave the country in the 1930s 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.”
In that one sentence the author has basically said Livingston is correct as he has AFAIK made no claim that Hitler supported the Zionist beyond the early 1930’s. 90% of this article deals with late 30’s and 40’s and, while factually correct, is of no relevance to what Livingston talked about.
NB I am making no claims regarding the statements by Livingston, I simply do not have the information to know who is correct. However this article reads as being an attack on Livingston using emotionally charged and disturbing but irrelevant facts.
ADAM
April 5, 2017 at 1:42 am
“Nazi propagandists claimed that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a “Vatican for the Jews,” that is a power centre of an international Jewish conspiracy and thus a threat to Germany. They also argued that an Allied victory would be a victory for the Jews. They repeated lies that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a threat to the religion of Islam in the entire Arab Middle East”
Well they weren’t that far off. The Greater Israel project. Mayhem in the Middle East, driven out into Europe. Leaving Israel to tidy up conveniently.
Almost seems like it was planned(!)
SANDY
April 5, 2017 at 7:39 am
Just reading this article, I take note that Liningstone’s comment was very specific 1932/33 not later. Therefore it does appear that his comment was accurate since it is not the opinion behind an act, ….
Did Zionist movement get support to go to Palestine?…..answer…… Yes.
The merit of this support and motivation can be seen in hindsight…. But support was there, however devious…..who is to say that Livingstone’s comment ” until Hitler went mad” is not exactly what happened.
Livingstone’s comment here proves his ethic that such murder is madness.
Personal opinion , one person alone does not achieve such vast monstrous acts, it takes more, it is sad to say, anyone observing and not preventing, is equally guilty.
The point…. Help to go was given, accurate, motive… A different story
NICK
April 5, 2017 at 8:54 am
Mr livingstone has repeatedly stated the comment he made was in reference to hitlers beliefs “in the early 1930’s, before he went mad”. Your article contains one paragraph only in relation to the early 1930s. The rest of what you have written is not relevant to livingstones comments but possibly to your book. Talking about livingstone’s lack of knowledge of world war 2, whether accurate or not, is irrelevant. He did not make any comment on world war 2. I am not passing an opinon on his comments or their accuracy. I am highlighting the fact this piece doesnt address his comments in any kind of depth or accuracy itself. Ironic really given he is accused of inaccuracy.
BOB SYKES
April 5, 2017 at 10:34 am
If he’d said that Balfour supported Zionism would there have been any outrage?
BOB SYKES
April 5, 2017 at 10:47 am
“For a time the Nazi program of making Germany Judenrein (clean of Jews) and the Zionist policy of seeking olim (immigrants) coincided.”
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/haavara
YECHIEL LEVIN
April 5, 2017 at 12:10 pm
However true or false Livingstone’s contentions, the argument as to their truth misses the point entirely. To Leftists like Red Ken, there is no truth or falsehood, only rhetoric in the service of a cause. The linkage of Hitler to Zionism has one goal and one goal only: the linking of Donald Trump, and the American right more generally, despite their strong support of and for Israel, to Nazis and Nazism.
PATRICK BONNER
April 5, 2017 at 1:36 pm
I appreciate this article examining the real reasons for Hitler’s tacit support for the migration of some German Jews to the Middle East. Historical accuracy has been lost in the quagmire of the anti-Semitism debate within the Labour Party and the British mass media. It would be helpful, however, if the clear definition of Hitler’s dire intentions with respect to German Jews, which the British Labour Movement, then and now, diligently condemns and fights against, was reciprocated in the definition of Zionism and what constitutes anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
Listening to and reading literature from the Jewish Socialist Group I believe that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not one and the same thing. A Jew, as well as a socialist, can be anti-Zionist while not being anti-Semitic. However, the Jewish media, reflecting the modern Zionist requirement to do all possible to defend Israel, condemns all anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism in order to divert all criticism away from Israel in relation to the Palestinian question. While the press is full of the issues surrounding the Labour Party and alleged anti-Semitism the Jewish state is busy continuing to illegally expropriate land from the Palestinians in order to populate those lands with Jewish settlers. That this expropriation is seen to be justified by the Chief Rabbi, the Jewish Labour Party and, because there is no overt criticism, by the right of the Labour Party, is even sadder than the clumsy and mistaken utterances of one of the most overt anti-racists in the country – Ken Livingstone.
For Tom Watson, his agenda is to whittle away support for the Jeremy Corbyn leadership; for the Chief Rabbi his agenda is to defend the Israeli state, its continued expansion into remaining Palestinian territories and to undermine the Labour Party among British Jews; for the press and mass media, their agenda, as always, is to undermine and defeat anyone who represents a real challenge to the hegemony of the capitalist system and their privileged existence in society.
When the inevitable crisis of capitalism again reaches its zenith (as predicted by a great scholar of Jewish origin) and the naked aggression of the right extremists is once again threatening society, it will be those who today are being condemned as anti-Semitic who will step up to the plate to challenge real anti-Semitism and racism.
If Labour are in dispute with each other at this stage it is because the skulduggery and tangential attacks by the Labour right make the defence of each and every socialist in the Labour Party an overarching requirement to stem and defeat the attacks by the Labour right and the use by the right (as with the mass media) of each and every issue to achieve their aims.
Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters will try not to be dragged into these issues which in many cases are known about long before but saved only to be released at the moment and in a way to maximise their effect. In this case the Ken Livingstone issue has contributed to the diversion of the issues away from the continued expropriation of Palestinian land by the Israeli state, a success you might say for the Zionist agenda.
TERRY LEE
April 5, 2017 at 2:48 pm
Thank you Jeffrey, An excellent historical explaination of the 3rd Reichs view of Zionism and it’s actions towards it. I’m surprised the ex-mayor pouts this dogma. We would, surely, hope he is perfectly capable of checking facts before spouting such false rhetoric, unless of course he has another agenda. Either his party or the the law should act, or of course both.
GLYN JONES
April 5, 2017 at 5:51 pm
Livingstone is talking utter rubbish, but what is worth noting is the media’s reaction, they are all piling in slating livingstone , slating the Labour Party for not expelling livingstone, but they never praise Corbyn or the Labour Party for fighting the injustice that the tories are pouring on the vulnerable, underfunding the NHS since 2010, causing poverty and children having to go to school without breakfast because of benefit cuts, it’s about time the media stopped supporting the tories and got behind Corbyn and the Labour Party who are fighting the Tory injustice.
SJ COOMBS
April 5, 2017 at 9:46 pm
What ever makes you believe that Livingstone can be classed as an intellectual?
MIKE
April 5, 2017 at 10:29 pm
This article peddles the same nonsensical historical distortions that help fuel antisemetism around the world.
To state the same rubbish discredited rhetoric used the bibi netenyahu, about the grand mufti of Jerusalem and his collaboration with the Nazis just further delegitimizes this author. It is ironic because everyone seems to deflect the real question here. Which is how the world can sit by and watch Israel commit atrocities against the Palestinian people for over 50 years on the basis of religious zealotry and do absolutely nothing about it while strolling around propagating this notion of having the moral high ground.
Utter nonsense.
JAMES EDWARDS
April 6, 2017 at 12:20 pm
Great, fascinating article. But an odd concluding thought. City mayors (and politicians in general) are not known for their intellectualism. It’s akin to looking at Trump and despairing at the ignorance of Ivy League professors.
EDWARD SOLOMON
April 6, 2017 at 2:39 pm
The worst part of this debacle is that the entire premise of Livingstone’s historical revisionism is to directly link the demise of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis with the creation of the State of Israel and forge a collaborative connection between Hitler’s Nazi party and the Zionist movement, thereby making the Jews agents in their own demise and placing them on a level with the Nazis because they, as he puts it, drove out 700,000 Palestinian Arabs at gunpoint (also a complete falsification).
It is bordering on Holocaust denial and it is a grave offence to history that his lies go unchecked by reporter after reporter, who collectively fail to hold hi
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JOHN C
April 16, 2017 at 1:01 pm
Except I don’t think Livingston would disagree with any of the history you refer to. The only comments he made were regarding an opportunistic cooperation in 1933-34 by some strange bedfellows, never alleging any common purpose. For this he has been demonised and long after any memory of what he actually said has been forgotten anyone who speaks in his support is tarred with the same brush, and any attempt he makes to defend himself is added to the roster of his sin. There are enough genuine and enthusiastic antisemites in the world without the need for invention.
MATT SCOTT
April 16, 2017 at 11:36 pm
None of this otherwise excellent article actually contradicts anything that Livingstone said, except the accusation that Livinstone claimed “Hitler was a Zionist”. He has vehemently denied expressing that opinion.
B.A. FREEMAN
January 10, 2018 at 9:31 pm
mr. herf, what makes U think that mr. livingstone is ignorant of history? my take on the matter is that anybody who can reach the mayoralty of london is *anything* but stupid; instead, his stance is but another example of the hard-left practice of the Big Lie. we need to remember to whom he is speaking: the product of british public schools. the average briton is nominally leftist upon entry to the workforce and adulthood, but only because he has stewed in a leftist sauce for at least a decade; he has been taught leftist platitudes in leiu of critical thinking, and has never been exposed to opposing positions. in other words, mr. livingstone is lying to the man in the street.
i suppose that it is possible that mr. livingstone is as deluded as those whom he is addressing, but i suspect that he knows very well what he is saying. if one has not been taught history, the words of an authority figure can often convince one of the veracity of the words – hence, the Big Lie. so why would he lie? what benefit is there in misleading the public about history? the answer is that the hard left is incapable of winning elections, because the changes for which it calls are unpalatable to the electorate. the hard left learned well in the last century that when society is collapsing, it is much easier for them to seize control. thus, if they *force* society into collapse, they can seize control.
so how can they do that? given that parliament has been quite leftist compared to non-european parliamentary bodies, regardless of the party affiliations of the ruling groups, it’s a simple matter to declare martial law when the ordinary business of everyday life can no longer be conducted due to the violence of pious (salafi, or “like muhammed and the first muslims”) muslims. pious muslims are a sort of proxy army for the left; no matter how bad the attacks of pious muslims, nobody will suspect that the left is complicit in them. once martial law is declared, all it takes is an assassination or 50 to seize control; that’s *far* easier than a forced “revolution” by a Red Brigades type group.
show me that mr. livingstone is simply mistaken, and i’ll believe that his statement was a mistake; otherwise, i’ll use occam’s razor and find that he is quite knowledgeable – and treasonous.
AYATOLLAH GHILMEINI
January 18, 2018 at 8:27 pm
This is an exceptional piece of scholarship on a topical subject that needed exactly this treatment.
Sadly, for anti-Zionists, this puts them back where they do not want to be, espousing the same ideas and objectives as Hitler when they prefer to pursue his goals using his methods while slandering the Zionism with the Hitler brush.
As for the risible Livingstone, his alliance with anti-Zionists is of the same color of a previous anti-Zionist alliance, the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact.
PD
April 27, 2018 at 5:19 pm
But what was the Haavara Agreement? I thought that was what Ken was referring to.
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TONY GREENSTEIN
May 12, 2022 at 11:49 pm
Professor Herf’s states that ‘The fact is however that Hitler and the Nazis despised Zionism and did all they could to defeat it.’
This is simply untrue. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (p.41) that:
‘a great movement called Zionism arose among them.’ However his anti-Semitism dictated that the Jews must be engaged in political chicanery.
‘They [the Zionists] have not the slightest intention of building up a Jewish State in Palestine so as to live in it. What they really are aiming at is to establish a central organization for their international swindling and cheating.’
I am surprised that the good professor hasn’t bothered to study such a basic text as Mein Kampf.
To give but 2 examples the late David Cesarani, who I hope isn’t going to be accused of antisemitism wrote in his final and by far his best book, ‘The Final Solution’ that:
‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.’
Similarly Yf’att Weiss described how Nazi Germany ‘gave free rein to isolationist [i.e. Zionist] Jewish organizations and clearly preferred them to assimilationist German-Jewish entities.’
Yf’att Weiss, The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement, p.30.
It would be tedious to quote other respected pro-Zionist historians such as Lucy Dawidowicz and Francis Nicosia to the same effect. By his wild and hysterical rhetoric Professor Herf simply abandons all objectivity becoming instead a political partisan.
It is indisputable that on 28 January 1935 Heydrich, who was the ‘real engineer of the final solution’ issued a directive stating:
the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership…. (they are) not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organisations (assimilationists).’
Dawidowicz quotes this in her War Against the Jews p.118 and Nicosia in Zionism and Antisemitism, p.119. There are many more instances of such favouritism. Why deny it?
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