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

In the postwar era, he focused his attention on Germany and became known for his promotion of friendship and reconciliation based on his internationalism and his ethic of brotherly love.

His grandfather, Rabbi Samuel Marcus Gollancz, had migrated to the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century from Witkowo, near Gniezno (then Gnesen in Prussia) to become cantor of the Hambro' Synagogue in London.

[4] The firm, Gollancz Ltd., published pacifist and socialist nonfiction as well as, by the mid-1930s, a solid selection of contemporary fiction, including authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Daphne du Maurier, and Franz Kafka.

[5] While Gollancz published The Red Army Moves by Geoffrey Cox on the Winter War in 1941, he omitted some criticisms of the USSR.

In the early 1940s, Gollancz was sympathetic to Richard Acland's socialist Common Wealth Party and gave talks for the group before the general election of 1945.

His 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.

In addition to his highly successful publishing business, Gollancz was a prolific writer on a variety of subjects, and put his ideas into action by establishing campaigning groups.

This was followed by refutation of the anti-German (as opposed to anti-Nazi) doctrine of Sir Robert Vansittart in the pamphlet Shall Our Children Live or Die published in late 1941.

Published early in the new year of 1943, the pamphlet sold a quarter of a million copies within three months[15] and was quoted in the Parliament of Canada in 1943,[16] and in The Adelaide Advertiser on Saturday 15 May 1943.

Towards the end of June 1943, Gollancz suffered a serious nervous breakdown, believed to have been brought on by overwork (he had cut out holidays and reduced his social and cultural life) and his identification with the Nazis' victims.

In September 1945, he started an organisation Save Europe Now (SEN) to campaign for the support of Germans,[20] and over the next four years he wrote another eight pamphlets and books addressing the issue and visited the country several times.

In his 1946 book Our Threatened Values, Gollancz described the conditions Sudeten German prisoners faced in a Czech internment camp: "They live crammed together in shacks without consideration for gender and age...

Everyone looked emaciated... the most shocking sights were the babies... nearby stood another mother with a shrivelled bundle of skin and bones in her arms... Two old women lay as if dead on two cots.

When Field Marshal Bernard 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, Gollancz wrote in response about food shortages in Germany before the end of World War II, pointing out that many prisoners in Nazi concentration camps never even received 800 calories.

For his biographer, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Gollancz's campaign was based in his concern for the moral underdog and his enjoyment in fighting for unpopular causes.

This body was based on "the universalist ethic of Judaism" and aimed to work in the newly formed state of Israel "to relieve the suffering of Jews and Arabs indifferently.

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

In May 1951, Gollancz invited Harold Wilson to chair an AWP committee and write a pamphlet which was eventually called 'War on Want – a Plan for World Development', published on 9 June 1952.

This document led to the founding of the international anti-poverty charity War on Want; its parent body, the AWP, waned after Gollancz stepped down from the chairmanship in 1952.