Victor Cazalet

Victor Alexander Cazalet (born December 27, 1896 - † July 4, 1943 in Gibraltar ) was a British politician (Conservative Party).

Life and activity

Early years

Cazalet was of Huguenot descent . He grew up in a wealthy family as the son of a merchant family. Under the influence of his mother, a believer in Christian Science philosophy , he too developed into a devoted advocate of this teaching. Cazalet's godmother was the British Queen Victoria , who had repeatedly stayed at the Cazalet's house in Nice .

Cazalet was educated at Eton School , where future Prime Minister Anthony Eden was one of his direct classmates. He then studied - interrupted by the use in the First World War - at Christ Church College of Oxford University . From 1915 he took part in the First World War with the Queen's Own West Kent Yeomanry. In 1917 he reached the rank of captain . From 1918 to 1919 he was on the staff of General Knox, who was a British expeditionary force in support of the counterrevolutionary "white" troops who fought against the Bolsheviks in Siberia.

Career as a politician and businessman

Cazalet's political career was made possible by a high degree of financial independence: in addition to the considerable means he had at home, he had considerable income, which he received from art deals. So he could afford a lavish lifestyle, go on numerous trips and give friends expensive gifts. As a landowner, Cazalet owned a property near Cranbrooke, Kent, which included a large country house (Great Swifts). In London he again owned a luxurious apartment in Belgrave Square.

On the occasion of the British general elections in 1924 , Cazalet succeeded for the first time as a member of the House of Commons , the British Parliament. From then on, he represented the constituency of Chippenham in this until his death in 1943 . In the elections of 1929, 1931 and 1935 his mandate was confirmed.

During a trip to Palestine in 1924, Cazelet became a staunch supporter of modern Zionism. Previously, he had been extremely critical of Judaism - at least in Eastern Europe and the United States - under the impression of his experiences in Russia in 1918 and 1919, he had developed a low opinion of the Jewish population there, while he suspected the American Jews of to support the Soviet side in the Russian civil war and to stir up the anti-counter-revolutionary “white” troops in the USA: He characterized the “Jewish influence in America” as the root of the problem of what, in his opinion, was insufficiently fighting Soviet Russia the USA.

During the Spanish Civil War , Cazalet sympathized with the Frankists and was a member of the Friends of National Spain committee.

Cazalet's attitude to the National Socialist regime in Germany was varied: after a visit to Germany in August 1933, during which he visited the Dachau concentration camp , he declared that he had gained a positive impression of this camp, in which he had no “undue misery” or “ undue inconvenience “on the part of the inmates (“ no undue misery or discomfort ”). Cazalet also found a German labor camp that he visited in 1936 to be positive in comparison with similar institutions in the Soviet Union. After a trip to Austria, which had just been annexed by Germany, in April 1938, he was appalled by the treatment of the Jews living in Vienna by the new rulers: From then on he wrote articles for newspapers in which he adopted a liberal attitude that allowed as many refugees as possible into the country the British Government pleaded. He also joined the Rathbone Committee. The appeasement policy of the governments Baldwin and Chamberlain against the Nazi state until 1938 was Cazalet with skepticism about in 1935, this but supported outwardly from party discipline.

Politically, Cazalet had close ties to Winston Churchill since the early 1920s , whom he often visited on his Chartwell estate in Kent - near Cazalet's own estate. During the Second World War , Churchill appointed Cazalet, who was reactivated as an officer in 1940, as his liaison with the Polish government in exile .

During the Second World War, Cazalets was one of the few prominent Allied politicians who publicly discussed the mass murder of Eastern European Jews in the areas controlled by the National Socialists. In a speech in the British House of Commons in May 1943, in which he criticized the results of the Allied Bermuda Conference , he declared that the Allies would act with insufficient urgency against the murders in Eastern Europe: "The Jews are being exterminated today." (["There is no time to wait any longer!] The Jews are now being exterminated.")

Cazalet died on July 4, 1943, together with the head of the Polish government-in-exile Sikorski and fourteen other people, when the plane with which they wanted to fly back from the British base in Gibraltar to Great Britain crashed shortly after take-off .

Family and personal life

Cazalet's sister, Thelma Cazalet-Keir, was a prominent feminist and MP for the Conservative Party , while his brother was a racehorse trainer.

Cazalet was a teetotaler who did not consume alcohol or tobacco. He never married and remained childless. Since most of the close friendships he had in life were with homosexual and bisexual men (such as Harold Nicolson , the author Hugh Walpole , the tennis player Gottfried von Cramm , the parliamentarian Bob Boothby and Francis Lenn Taylor , the father of Elizabeth Taylor ) , he has been said to have homosexual tendencies again and again.

Cazalet was the godfather of Winston Churchill's youngest daughter Mary and Elizabeth Taylor , who later became known as an actress , for whose schooling in Great Britain he also paid for. Since the philosophy of Christian Science , to which Cazalet was committed, rejects the concept of the godfather, the information in the literature is contradictory as to whether he had an official godfather status for these girls, or whether these were unofficial obligations on his part.

literature

• Robert Rhodes James: Victor Cazalet: A Portrait . London 1976.

Individual evidence

1. ^ David Cesarani / Paul A. Levine: Bystanders to the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation , p. 38.
2. ^ Mary Soames: The Daughter's Tale: The Memoir of Winston and Clementine Churchill's Youngest Daughter , 2011, p. 23.