I HAVE to confess being slightly puzzled about the Labour Party’s pursuit of Ken Livingstone regarding his comments that Hitler supported Zionism (“Red Ken hits out as he fights to stay in Labour”, The Herald, March 30). There is a considerable body of evidence to illustrate that the Nazi Party supported Zionism in the period up to 1937.

In his book on The Final Solution the eminent Holocaust expert Professor David Cesarani quotes from a 1934 Gestapo report as follows : “The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to further emigration.” It concluded with satisfaction that the Zionists had gained the upper hand over German nationalist Jews opposed to Zionism so that “in place of a rushed and poorly prepared emigration in 1933 we now have well-regulated emigration whose sole destination is Palestine”.

The Gestapo under Heydrich established a Jewish department in 1935 headed by Edler von Mildenstein. Professor Cesarani states that “he believed that Jews were aliens in Germany but saw little point in just suppressing them. Instead they should be assisted to emigrate to their own homeland. To this end the agencies of the party and the state should work with the Zionist organisations rather than frustrate their operation”. Note the use of the word “homeland”. He further states that “since the conclusion of the Ha’avara agreement in 1933, the Nazis had favoured Zionism and assisted Jewish migration to Palestine”.

Whilst there is no hard evidence to validate Hitler’s formal support for Zionism, it is stretching credibility somewhat to believe that Hitler was unaware of this activity within the Jewish department of the party given his obsession with “the Jewish question”.

Only when the 1937 Peel Commission recommended a separate Jewish state did Nazi opposition to Zionism emerge in a report written by Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann himself had visited Palestine in October 1937 to see if there were ways of speeding up Jewish emigration, only to be thrown out by the British shortly after arriving in Haifa.

Realising that the British wanted out of Palestine, his fear was that an autonomous Jewish state – as opposed to a Jewish homeland within a Protectorate – would allow that state to draw international attention to anti-Jewish persecution within Germany. He therefore recommended a major policy shift as follows: “Nor should the Third Reich do anything to strengthen the Jewish community of Palestine or assist the achievement of statehood”. This would appear to support Ken Livingstone’s claim as to the situation pre-1937.

Robert Menzies,

2 Burnbrae Gardens, Falkirk.