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Hitler Did Not Support Zionism
(Boston Globe) Niall Ferguson - In an interview on BBC last week, Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, claimed that "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." Some Nazi officials did indeed favor emigration as the "solution to the Jewish Question." But to claim that this was Hitler's preferred option is simply wrong. In a speech he gave in April 1920, Hitler called for the Jews "to be exterminated." In Mein Kampf he wrote: "If at the beginning of the [First World] War and during the war (12,000) or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas...the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain." Germans who voted National Socialist in 1932 and 1933 were not voting for a Zionist resettlement program. The writer is a professor of history at Harvard and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford.