Ken Livingstone’s guru on Hitler and Zionism is a former American campus radical who was jailed for three years for possessing marijuana and obstructing the police.
Lenni Brenner is a left-wing agitator who has long argued that there was collaboration between Zionists and Nazis.
Mr Brenner, 79, a Trotskyite from a Jewish family, has suggested that he was the one who inspired Bob Dylan to stop singing folk songs and concentrate on contemporary urban issues.
During the 1960s Mr Brenner would hang about the university campus at Berkeley in California, a hotbed of protest, advocating racial equality, drug reform and opposition to the Vietnam war. He spent 39 months in San Luis Obispo state prison after being caught with a cannabis cigarette. Although he was given probation, he was deemed to have broken its terms when he was accused of blocking a door during a student occupation of a university building during a demonstration about race.
In those days he was known as Lenni Glaser, his stepfather’s surname, but he used his father’s name for his writings. His provocative book Zionism in the Age of Dictators, published in 1983, claimed that Nazis and Zionists had a pact enabling Jews to emigrate to Palestine.
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The hard-left publication Labour Herald, then edited by Mr Livingstone and Ted Knight, the former leader of the London borough of Lambeth, carried a review of the book and an interview with its author. Their journal was being published on the presses of the Workers’ Revolutionary party, financed by the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
The book appears to have mesmerised Mr Livingstone. He has threatened to produce it as evidence for his disciplinary proceedings by the Labour party for suspected antisemitism.
“I was shocked by the revelations,” he wrote in his memoirs You Can’t Say That, published in 2011 before he stood for a final time as the official Labour candidate for mayor of London.
Mr Livingstone observed in the autobiography that the purported agreement between Zionists and Nazis “fitted Hitler’s 1932 policy of ‘Jews to Palestine’ ”. He claimed that Zionists declined to join a boycott of the Nazis.
Mr Livingstone wrote: “Of course the Labour Zionists cannot be blamed for not anticipating that Nazism would become the greatest evil in human history, but however well intentioned their motives it was a catastrophic error of judgment not to throw all the resources of Zionism against Nazism.”
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He claimed: “Brenner’s books helped form my view of Zionism and its history and so I was not going to be silenced by smears of antisemitism whenever I criticised Israeli government policies.”
Mr Brenner’s claims are regularly cited by pro-Palestine supporters and he was a guest of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign in 2007.
The historian and author Niall Ferguson wrote in The Sunday Times yesterday: “This is not a book cited in scholarly works, not least because Brenner is not a scholar but a political activist.”
Mr Brenner stood for mayor of Berkeley in 1986 but came last with 482 votes and has since returned to New York.
