Ken Livingstone has repeated for the second time this week his claims that Hitler supported Zionism.

In an interview on BBC News this morning, he claimed “dozens and dozens of books by academics” backed his view that the Nazi leader had at one time been in favour of a Jewish state.

Mr Livingstone, who was suspended by Labour in April after he said Hitler “was supporting Zionism before he went mad,” also claimed Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, helped Jewish resistance fighters in Palestine.

He said: “Adolf Eichmann negotiated a deal with the Zionist movement to give them guns which they could use in their underground army.”

He went on to say the relationship between the Nazi government and Zionist movement was “not just a one-off thing, there was a whole working relationship over the 1930s”.

Yesterday, Mr Livingstone appeared on Vanessa Feltz’s breakfast show on BBC London, where he insisted he was correct in his remarks.

Following the broadcast, Marie van der Zyl, vice president of the Board of Deputies, urged Labour to expel him.

“Ken Livingstone seems to want to rewrite history to make it seem like Zionism was responsible for the Holocaust, which is as false as it is grotesquely offensive.

"Every day that Labour does not expel him is a stain on the party.”

Responding today to the Board’s comments, Mr Livingstone told BBC News: “If I had said ‘Hitler was a Zionist,’ I wouldn’t just have apologised, I would've gone straight to my doctor to check that I wasn’t in the first stages of dementia.

“To suggest that Hitler was a Zionist is mad. He loathed and feared Jews all his life. But he did do a deal with the Zionist movement in the 1930s.”