Tread carefully

Dr JOHN P. FOX, who wrote in defence of Ken Livingstone’s hitler remarks (Mail), was also a witness for David Irving in his 2000 libel case against Professor Deborah Lipstadt in which the judge found Irving ‘an active holocaust denier’, ‘antiSemitic and racist’ and ‘associated with right-wing extremists who promoted neo-Nazism.’

The judge said Irving ‘treated the historical evidence in a manner which fell far short of the standard to be expected of a conscientious historian’. The fact that Dr Fox gave evidence on behalf of such a person shows up his own credibility.

The haavara agreement was an august 1933 arrangement between Zionist organisations and the German government to facilitate the migration of Jews to Palestine by allowing the transfer of their capital in the form of German export goods. The Zionist organisation saw this as a way of attracting Jews to Palestine, thereby rescuing them from the Nazis, even if it meant cooperation with hitler.

The German goods were purchased with money paid by the prospective migrants into the accounts of a Jewish trust company in Germany. The money was used by the Zionist organisation to buy German goods to be sold in Palestine. Money from the sale then went to the immigrants who settled in Palestine.

The Zionist organisation subsidised the sale: if the goods fetched less money than the amount they were bought for, it paid the immigrants the difference. The haavara continued to function until World War II, despite attempts by the Nazi party to curtail its activities.

It was a major factor in making possible the transfer of 60,000 Jews to Palestine, saving their lives.

any ‘hysteria’ about this concerns distortion of the facts to make the victims of the most terrible sufferings somehow collaborators with those who inflicted those sufferings — or to make those who inflicted the sufferings supporters of those on whom they inflicted them. The hysteria is about re-writers of history whose motive is hatred of Jews.

EDWARD DILL, LONDON N19