Ken Livingstone has caused fresh controversy in the ongoing saga of his comments on Hitler and Zionism, as he arrived for a two-day private disciplinary hearing with the Labour Party on the matter.
Almost a year after he told the BBC’s Vanessa Feltz Show that Hitler had been a Zionist in the early 1930s, and had helped German Jews emigrate to Palestine, this morning he told reporters that actual Nazi policy at the time went even further.
“The [Nazi] SS set up training camps so that German Jews who going to go there could be trained to cope with a very different sort of country," he said.
“When the Zionist movement asked the Nazi Government, would they stop Jewish Rabbis doing their sermons in Yiddish and make them do it in Hebrew, he [Hitler] agreed to that.
“He also passed a law that said the Zionist flag and the Swastika were the only flags that could be flown in Germany.
“And then they started selling Mauser pistols to the underground Jewish army."
Mr Livingstone continued: “So you had, right up until the start of the second world war, real collaboration.
“And when, in July 1937, many senior Nazis gathered at their Foreign Offices, saying we should stop sending German Jews to Palestine because it risks creating a Jewish state, a directive comes directly from Hitler saying, ‘no continue with this policy.’
“Everyone who studies history just knows this. It is true.”
Mr Livingstone faces a charge of engaging in conduct that was grossly detrimental to the party following his controversial comments about Adolf Hitler.
He is being represented at the hearing by human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield, but has admitted he expected to be expelled from the party at the end of it.
