BERLIN (AP) — Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone views the furor over his reported comment that Adolf Hitler got "things done" as a misunderstanding, according to an interview with a German newspaper published Monday.

The World Jewish Congress called for Ecclestone to resign after the comments appeared in The Times of London on Saturday.

The Bild daily quoted Ecclestone as saying that "this was all a big misunderstanding."

"I did not put Hitler forward as a positive example, but simply noted that, before his appalling crimes, he acted successfully against unemployment and the economic crisis," Ecclestone was quoted as saying. Bild noted in its article that Hitler created jobs through rearmament.

Ecclestone said that it was never his intention to "hurt the feelings of a community," Bild reported. "Many of my closest friends are Jews."

The flap came ahead of next Sunday's German Grand Prix at the Nuerburgring circuit.

Guenther Oettinger, the governor of Baden-Wuerttemberg state, had planned to meet Ecclestone. However, his regional government's spokesman, Christoph Dahl, said Oettinger decided at the weekend to cancel the meeting after the comments were published.

A senior German Jewish official was quoted by the Handelsblatt daily as calling for a boycott of Ecclestone by Formula One teams.

"No team should work with him any more," Dieter Graumann, a vice president of the Central Council of Jews, told Handelsblatt. "A boycott would now be more than appropriate."

The Times quoted Ecclestone as saying: "In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done."

But "in the end he got lost, so he wasn't a very good dictator."