Britain’s opposition Labour Party suspended former London mayor Ken Livingstone on Thursday in a row over anti-Semitism, as the party struggles with deep divisions since electing a hard-left leader last summer.
Dozens of Labour lawmakers had demanded that leader Jeremy Corbyn suspend Livingstone – his ally and a party veteran – over remarks he made about Hitler being a Zionist in defense of a colleague the party suspended a day earlier over anti-Semitic remarks.
The Labour party has been struggling to pull together after Corbyn swept into the leadership in September on a wave of enthusiasm, particularly among younger members, for change and an end to ‘establishment politics’.
Corbyn’s views have often jarred with many Labour lawmakers in parliament, however, dividing the party at a time when it is trying to hold the government, which is also deeply split over Britain’s membership of the European Union, to account.
“Ken Livingstone has been suspended by the Labour Party, pending an investigation, for bringing the Party into disrepute,” the Labour Party said in a statement.
It said another lawmaker, John Mann, had been summoned over his behavior after he was filmed shouting “You’ve lost it” at Livingstone and accusing him of being a “Nazi apologist” over the former mayor’s comments that Hitler had supported Zionism “before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews.”
Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the comments, saying anti-Semitism, like racism, was unacceptable. “It is quite clear that the Labour Party has a problem with anti-Semitism.”
Jewish leaders said the party should introduce a zero-tolerance policy against anti-Semitism, and some Labour lawmakers, including the party’s candidate for mayor in an election next week, distanced themselves from Livingstone.
In an interview with BBC London, Livingstone said neither Shah nor the Labour Party were anti-Semitic.
“I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the state of Israel and its abuse of Palestinians, but I’ve never heard someone be anti-Semitic,” Livingstone said.
“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 6 million Jews.”
The Haavara Agreement (Hebrew: הסכם העברה Translit.: heskem haavara Translated: “transfer agreement”) was an agreement between Nazi Germany and Zionist German Jews signed on 25 August 1933. The agreement was finalized after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Anglo-Palestine Bank (under the directive of the Jewish Agency) and the economic authorities of Nazi Germany. The agreement was designed to help facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. While it helped Jews emigrate, it forced them to temporarily give up possessions to Germany before departing. Those possessions could later be re-obtained by transferring them to Palestine as German export goods.[1][2] The agreement was controversial at the time, and was criticised by many Jewish leaders both within the Zionist movement (such as the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky) and outside it.
Hanotea (Hebrew: הנוטע), a Zionist citrus planting company, applied in May 1933 for the ability to transfer capital from Germany to Palestine. Hanotea served to assist German Jews’ immigration to Palestine as part of the Zionist endeavor. In a deal worked out with the German government, Hanotea would receive money from prospective immigrants and use this money to buy German goods. These goods, along with the immigrants, would then be shipped to Palestine. In Palestine, import merchants would then buy the goods from the immigrants, liquidating their investment. This arrangement appeared to be operating successfully, and so paved the way for the later Haavara Agreement. Connected to Hanotea was a Polish Zionist Jew, Sam Cohen. He represented Zionist interests in direct negotiation with the Nazis beginning in March 1933.[4]
“ CERTIFICATE
The Trust and Transfer Office “Haavara” Ltd. places at the disposal of the Banks in Palestine amounts in Reichmarks which have been put at its disposal by the Jewish immigrants from Germany. The Banks avail themselves of these amounts in Reichmarks in order to make payments on behalf of Palestinian merchants for goods imported by them from Germany. The merchants pay in the value of the goods to the Banks and the “Haavara” Ltd. pays the countervalue to the Jewish immigrants from Germany. To the same extent that local merchants will make use of this arrangement, the import of German goods will serve to withdraw Jewish capital from Germany.
The Trust and Transfer Office,
HAAVARA, LTD.
”
— Example of the certificate issued by Haavara to Jews emigrating to Palestine
[5]
The Haavara (Transfer) Agreement was agreed to by the German government in 1933 to allow German Jews to transfer property from Germany to Palestine, for the purpose of encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany. The Haavara company operated under a similar plan as the earlier Hanotea company. The Haavara Company required immigrants to pay at least 1000 pounds sterling into the banking company. This money would then be used to buy German exports for import to Palestine.
For German Jews, the Agreement offered a way to leave an increasingly hostile environment in Nazi Germany; for the Yishuv, the new Jewish community in Palestine, it offered access to both immigrants and some economic support; and for the Nazis it was seen as a way of breaking the Anti-Nazi boycott of 1933, which had mass support among European Jews and was seen by the German state as a potential threat to a fragile German economy.[6]
The Haavara Agreement was thought among some Nazi circles to be a possible way to rid the country of its supposed “Jewish problem.” The head of the Middle Eastern division of the foreign ministry, the anti-Nazi Werner Otto von Hentig, supported the policy of concentrating Jews in Palestine. Von Hentig believed that if the Jewish population was concentrated in a single foreign entity, then foreign diplomatic policy and containment of the Jews would become easier.[7] Hitler’s own support of the Haavara Agreement was unclear and varied throughout the 1930s. Initially, Hitler criticized the agreement, but reversed his opinion and supported it in the period 1937-1939.[8]
After the invasion of Poland and the onset of World War II in 1939, the practical continuation of the Haavara agreement became impossible.
Leopold Itz, Edler von Mildenstein (30 November 1902 – November 1968[1]) was an SS officer of the 1930s and 1940s who is remembered as a leader of the Nazi Party’s support during the 1930s for the aims of Zionism.
He sometimes worked as a writer and used the pen name LIM (his initials). He was occasionally called an English “Baron” although his rank of Edler meant “nobleman” and has no exact English language equivalent; perhaps the nearest neighbor would be “Esquire.”
After the Second World War Mildenstein continued to live in West Germany, where he joined the Free Democratic Party and was elected to its Press Committee. In 1956, he went to Egypt to work for a radio station, and after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 he claimed immunity as an intelligence agent of the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency, a claim which was neither confirmed nor denied. Nothing was heard of him after 1964, when he published a book on cocktails.
Born in 1902 in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, Mildenstein belonged to the lowest tier of the Austrian nobility and was brought up as a Roman Catholic. He trained as an engineer and joined the Nazi Party in 1929, receiving the membership number 106,678. In 1932 he joined the SS, becoming one of the first Austrians to do so. According to his former SS colleague Dieter Wisliceny, from the First World War until 1935 Mildenstein visited the Middle East, including Palestine, several times.[2][3]
Mildenstein had taken an early interest in Zionism, even going so far as to attend Zionist conferences to help deepen his understanding of the movement. He actively promoted Zionism as a way out of the official impasse on the Jewish question: as a way of making Germany Judenrein (free of Jews). Some Zionists, whose movement had grown tremendously in popularity among German Jews since Hitler came to power, co-operated.[citation needed] On 7 April 1933, the Juedische Rundschau, the bi-weekly paper of the movement, declared that of all Jewish groups only the Zionist Federation of Germany was capable of approaching the Nazis in good faith as “honest partners”.[4][5] The Federation then commissioned Kurt Tuchler to make contact with possible Zionist sympathisers within the Nazi Party, with the aim of easing emigration to Palestine, and Tuchler approached Mildenstein, who was asked to write something positive about Jewish Palestine in the press. Mildenstein agreed, on condition that he be allowed to visit the country in person, with Tuchler as his guide. So, in the spring of 1933 an odd little party of four set out from Berlin, consisting of Mildenstein, Tuchler and their wives. They spent a month together in Palestine,.[2][6] Mildenstein came to write a series of articles for Der Angriff, the Berlin newspaper Goebbels founded in 1927. Mildenstein himself remaining for a total of six months before his return to Germany as an enthusiast for Zionism. He even began to study Hebrew.[7]
On his return, Mildenstein’s suggestion that the solution to the Jewish problem lay in mass migration to Palestine was accepted by his superiors within the SS. From August 1934 to June 1936 Mildenstein was put in charge of the Jewish Desk with the title of Judenreferent (Jewish Affairs Officer) in the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Security service of the SS, Section II/112; his title meaning that he was responsible for reporting on “Jewish Affairs,” under the overall command of Reinhard Heydrich.[8] During those years Mildenstein favoured a policy of encouraging Germany’s Jewish population to emigrate to Palestine, and in pursuit of this policy he developed positive contacts with Zionist organizations. SS officials were even instructed to encourage the activities of the Zionists within the Jewish community, who were to be favoured over the assimilationists, said to be the real danger to National Socialism. Even the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 had a special Zionist provision, allowing the Jews to fly their own flag.[2][6]
Adolf Eichmann, later one of the most significant organizers of the Holocaust, believed that his big break came in 1934, when he had a meeting with Mildenstein, a fellow-Austrian, in the Wilhelmstrasse and was invited to join Mildenstein’s department.[9][10] Eichmann later stated that Mildenstein rejected the vulgar anti-semitism of Streicher. Soon after his arrival in the section Mildenstein had given him a book on Judaism by Adolf Boehm, a leading Jew from Vienna.[11]
Between 9 September and 9 October 1934 the Nazi Party Berlin newspaper Der Angriff, founded and controlled by Joseph Goebbels, published a series of twelve pro-Zionist articles by Mildenstein under the title A Nazi Goes to Palestine. In honour of his visit, the newspaper issued a commemorative medallion, with the swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other.[2][6]
In the summer of 1935, then holding the rank of SS-Untersturmführer, Mildenstein attended the 19th Congress of the Zionist Organization in Lucerne, Switzerland, as an observer attached to the German Jewish delegation.[12] Mildenstein’s apparently pro-Zionist line was overtaken by events, and after a dispute with Reinhard Heydrich in 1936 he was removed from his post and transferred to the Foreign Ministry’s press department. He had fallen out of favour because migration to Palestine was not proceeding at a fast enough rate. His departure from the SD also saw a shift in SS policy, marked by the publication of a pamphlet warning of the dangers of a strong Jewish state in the Middle East, written by another “expert” on Jewish matters who had been invited to join Section II/112 by Mildenstein himself, Eichmann.[2][13] Mildenstein was replaced as the head of his former section by Kuno Schroeder.[14] Later in December 1939, Eichmann was made chief of the Jewish Department Referat IV B4 of the RSHA, which the SD became a part in September, 1939.[15][16]
As Germany moved into the Second World War, Mildenstein continued to write propaganda articles and books. After the war, his “Around the Burning Land of the Jordan” (1938)[17] and “The Middle East Seen from the Roadside” (1941)[18] were placed on the list of proscribed literature in the Soviet occupation zone and later in the German Democratic Republic.
Like the Haavara Agreement, Mildenstein’s 1933 visit to Palestine and the medal to commemorate it were later sometimes used by anti-Israel authors to argue that there was a relationship between Nazism and Zionism.[2]
