29 Facts About Victor Gollancz

Sir Victor Gollancz was a British publisher and humanitarian.

Victor Gollancz's loyalties shifted between liberalism and communism; he defined himself as a Christian socialist and an internationalist.

Victor Gollancz used his publishing house chiefly to promote pacifist and socialist non-fiction, and launched the Left Book Club.

Victor Gollancz founded the organisation Save Europe Now in 1945 to campaign for humane treatment of German civilians, and drew attention to their suffering, especially children, and atrocities committed against German civilians.

Victor Gollancz was commissioned into the Northumberland Fusiliers in October 1915, although he did not see active service.

Victor Gollancz proved to be an innovative and inspiring teacher; he introduced the first civics class to be taught at an English public school and many of his students went on to become teachers themselves, including James Harford and James Darling.

Victor Gollancz formed his own publishing company in 1927, publishing works by writers such as Ford Madox Ford and George Orwell, who wrote that "Victor Gollancz is of course part of the Communism-racket," to Rayner Heppenstall in July 1937.

Victor Gollancz was one of the founders of the Left Book Club, the first book club in the UK.

Victor Gollancz had a knack for marketing, sometimes taking out full-page newspaper advertisements for the books he published, a novelty at the time.

Victor Gollancz used eye-catching typography and book designs, and used yellow dust-covers on books.

Victor Gollancz's politics started as those of the Liberal Party and Guild Socialism.

Victor Gollancz finally broke with the party after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, and pledged himself to Christian socialism.

Victor Gollancz's father was an Orthodox Jew with a very literal interpretation of his faith; Gollancz's dislike of this attitude coloured his approach to organised Judaism for much of his life, but he continued to practise many Jewish rituals at home.

Victor Gollancz often claimed to be a Christian, although he was never baptised and his understanding of the religion was highly idiosyncratic.

Victor Gollancz's faith manifested itself in a consciousness of bliss and his lifelong political and social campaigning.

Victor Gollancz compiled a number of books of religious writings, including A Year of Grace, From Darkness to Light, God of a Hundred Names and The New Year of Grace.

Victor Gollancz was a keen music lover, an enthusiasm he explained in his final book, Journey Towards Music.

Victor Gollancz was knighted in the 1965 Queen's Birthday Honours List.

Victor Gollancz publicised the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime early on; in 1933 he had published the compilation volume The Little Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and Fritz Seidler's book on the Nazi persecution of the Jews The Bloodless Pogrom in 1934.

Victor Gollancz proposed a series of practical responses, centred around a rescue plan, and undertook a lecture and fundraising tour; he was made vice-president of Eleanor Rathbone's National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror.

Towards the end of June 1943, Victor Gollancz suffered a serious nervous breakdown, believed to have been brought on by overwork and his identification with the Nazis' victims.

Victor Gollancz maintained that hundreds of thousands of gentiles had been persecuted by the Nazis and many more had been terrorized into silence.

Victor Gollancz wrote regular critical articles for, and letters to, British newspapers, and after a visit to the British Zone of Occupation in October and November 1946, he published these along with shocking close-up photos of malnourished children he took there in In Darkest Germany in January 1947.

When Field Marshal Montgomery wanted to allot each German citizen a guaranteed diet of only 1,000 calories a day and justified this by referring to the fact that the prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp had received only 800, Victor Gollancz wrote about starvation in Germany, pointing out that many prisoners never even received 1,000 calories.

In 1960, Victor Gollancz was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his work with SEN.

In February 1951, Victor Gollancz wrote a letter to The Manchester Guardian asking people to join an international struggle against poverty.

Victor Gollancz's letter called for a negotiated end to the Korean War and the creation of an international fund "to turn swords into ploughshares", readers were asked to send a postcard to Victor Gollancz with the simple word 'yes'.

Victor Gollancz addressed the issue in a controversial pamphlet, The Case of Adolf Eichmann.

In 1919, Victor Gollancz married Ruth Lowy, an artist who had studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks.