Conservative Party chairman Francis Maude and Barnet Council deputy leader Matthew Offord accompanied students on a trip to Auschwitz last week. Visiting under the aegis of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz project, the group’s itinerary took in the town of Oswiecim and its Jewish cemetery, as well as the Nazi death camp site.

Councillor Offord — who is also the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Hendon — said afterwards: “The Holocaust is known to everyone but being told about such evil is not the same as seeing for myself how millions of people lived and ultimately died.

“Nothing quite prepares you for the vast scale of the Birkenau camp and the realisation that unspeakable horrors occurred in the very buildings in which we stood.”