In August 1933, a young Conservative MP, Victor Cazalet, paid a visit with friends to Nazi Germany. 

A rising Tory star, he asked to visit the recently opened Dachau concentration camp. “Great fun. I visit the ‘concentration camp’,” Cazalet recorded in his diary. “It was not very interesting. Quite well run, no undue misery or discomfort.” Told by his hosts that most of the prisoners were communists, he went on: “If that is the case, then they can stay there for all I care.”

On his return to England, Cazalet noted that his friends Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden had launched “furious attacks on me for being pro-Nazi”.

While initially slow to grasp the threat posed by Hitler, Cazalet was, unlike some of his colleagues, no right-wing fellow-traveller or ardent appeaser of the Nazis. Nor, despite witnessing the horror of the trenches, was he an advocate of “peace at any price”. 

Indeed, when he died a decade after his visit to Dachau in the plane crash which killed the Polish leader, General Sikorski, Cazalet was hailed by Chaim Weizmann as “one of the most precious friends the Jewish people have had in modern history”. 

That was no idle claim. He is now largely forgotten, but the week of Holocaust Memorial Day is an appropriate time to remember Cazalet’s passionate support for Zionism, campaigning against antisemitism and prophetic warnings about the danger Nazism presented to European Jewry. 

Born into a well-connected and well-heeled family — Queen Victoria was his godmother — Cazalet was, in many regards, a conventional Tory MP. 

Cazalet’s dismissive comments about the inmates at Dachau reflected his fierce anti-Communism, forged when he was sent to join the British mission in Siberia in the wake of the 1917 revolution. Opposing Britain’s resumption of diplomatic relations with the Bolshevik government in the late 1920s, Cazalet described it as “the most acute and ghastly personification of everything that is evil in the world today”. Later, he not only doggedly supported British non-intervention in the Spanish civil war but wrote that he prayed that “General Franco will win a victory for civilisation over Bolshevism”. 

Nonetheless, Cazalet’s diary of his visit to Germany in 1933 provided a hint of the unease which would rapidly grow into outright opposition to the regime. The group’s guide, Hitler’s close friend, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, he complained, had an “incredible … anti Jew complex”. In his biography of Cazalet, the late Conservative MP and historian Robert Rhodes James writes that the “crucial element” in his awakening to the horrors of Nazism was “the German treatment of the Jews”. From the mid-1930s, he continues, “Cazalet’s concern for the Jews was to become his principal concern in public life”. 

Cazalet had first visited Mandatory Palestine in 1924, writing afterwards of the need to “acquaint yourself with certain facts as regards the Zionist question before you get to the Holy Land”. 

However, his interest in the “Zionist question” was, as Cazalet himself put it, a matter of “family tradition”. Cazalet’s Hugenot ancestry had made him, suggests Rhodes James, “instinctively sympathetic to all matters concerning refugees, and the plight of the Jews throughout history had a profound emotional appeal to him”. Moreover, his grandfather, Edward, an industrialist based in Tsarist Russia, had witnessed pogroms against Jews first-hand and in 1878 advocated the establishment of a Jewish national home in the Middle East so that “the Jewish nation, after eighteen hundred years of exile, would have it in their power to return again to their own country”. 

As Cazalet outlined in a 1938 speech in Jerusalem chaired by Weizmann, his views had also been “tremendously influenced” by his friendship with the late Lord Balfour. Cazalet took pride, he told an American audience in 1941, in the fact that “my country, England, was responsible for the Balfour Declaration and for making practical to a considerable degree the ideas that lay behind it”. 

But that pride did not stop Cazalet, who chaired the Commons’ Palestine committee, speaking out against the British government’s betrayal of its commitments in the late 1930s — a betrayal which he felt more keenly as the nature of the Nazi threat to Europe’s Jews became ever-more apparent.

While Cazalet strongly backed the 1937 Peel Commission’s proposal to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, he was highly critical of the British administration of the Mandate when he visited it the following year. He revelled in the “remarkable” achievements of the Yishuv. “It’s all a dream … I am 100 per cent Zionist now,” he noted in his diary. But was appalled by the breakdown in law and order and what he viewed as the appeasement of the Arab population’s staunch opposition to partition. 

When the UK government’s White Paper decided to place strict limits on Jewish immigration the following spring, Cazalet — who had led a delegation of parliamentarians to lobby ministers before its publication — was outraged. 

All this, of course, took place against the backdrop of Hitler’s mounting terror campaign against the Jews and in 1937 Cazalet helped establish a cross-party group of MPs dedicated to the problem of antisemitism in Eastern Europe.

But as Chris Bryant argues in his recent book The Glamour Boys — which charts the story of Cazalet and a loosely knit group of fellow gay and bisexual Tory MPs who were among Hitler’s fiercest critics on the government benches — the personal was also political. In 1935, Cazalet’s close friend, the international tennis star Gottfried von Cramm, approached him for help. Although married, von Cramm was having a relationship with Jewish actor Manfred (formerly Manasseh) Herbst. Cazalet helped Herbst flee to Portugal and then on to Palestine, while the Nazis later imprisoned von Cramm for “sex perversion”.

The Anschluss two years later, Cazalet wrote in his diary, left him feeling “furious, raging, impotent” about the fate of a country which he had long admired. He was horrified when visiting Vienna a month after the German takeover to find Jews who were so desperate to get out of Austria that they begged him to take them to the UK as “a gardener, valet, anything”. Cazalet wrote to The Times decrying “what amounts to the extermination of the European Jews”. In the Commons, he recounted the scenes he had witnessed in Vienna. “Never since Milton immortalised the slaughter of the Albigenses has a whole community been in such danger,” he argued. 

But Cazalet’s call for Britain to take in more refugees and for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine once again fell on deaf ears. 

When war finally came the following summer, Cazalet took charge of a light anti-aircraft battery before being appointed the government’s liaison with Sikorski’s free Poles in 1940. Nonetheless, he remained actively engaged in the fight for Jewish self-determination. He berated the government for restricting the right of Jews to buy land in Palestine; decried the internment of “enemy aliens” — including many Jewish refugees — who had fled the Nazis; and relentlessly campaigned for the creation of a “Jewish Brigade”.

Appropriately, Cazalet’s last speech in the Commons in May 1943 highlighted “the horrors of the massacres at a camp called Treblinka” and argued that “unless our final victory includes the defeat of antisemitism it will be a sham victory”. He then set out with Sikorski on a month-long visit to the Middle East from which neither man would return. A week before his death, Cazalet spoke alongside David Ben-Gurion at a meeting in Jerusalem. “I would gladly give my life for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine,” he declared.