If it stops us forgetting Nazi horrors, some good can come of Aidan Burley's 'stupid' act

Bear with me first while I recap.

In 2011, Cannock Chase Tory MP Mr Burley organised a stag party in the French ski resort of Val Thorens for his friend Mark Fournier.

The group was photographed by a national newspaper with Mr Fournier wearing a black Nazi uniform and giving the infamous straight-armed salute.

Mr Burley apologised for any offence caused and to make amends he went to visit the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I've been there too, though not at the same time.

It is like a series of sickening punches to the gut seeing cabinets filled with suitcases, children's toys and hair. Lots and lots of human hair left over from the people murdered as Adolf Hitler pursued his perverted ideals.

The horror was too big to absorb while I stood there. It hit me on the coach afterwards and I had to turn my face towards the curtain and sob quietly.

The stag party is back in the news because after all this time the French authorities have concluded their prosecution of Mr Fournier, due to it being a crime in France to wear a Nazi uniform. He's had to fork out £2,000.

A report compiled by the Tories at the time was withheld from publication until this week to let the French authorities finish their own legal processes.

His own party brands Aidan Burley "stupid and offensive" as well as confirming he bought the costume.

He's not the only prominent MP to have ever had anything to do with Nazi uniforms. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, was pictured wearing one in 1987 when he was a student. It was a private party, in this country, and he wasn't an elected Member of Parliament at the time.

Even so, it's not the sort of thing you want to stick on your Facebook page.

It gives reason to pause for thought about just how we should treat the legacy of the Nazis outside of the classroom.

Mr Burley got a costume and handed over payment for it. It got packed into luggage, taken to France, unpacked, given to the groom and then worn in public.

I cringe at the idea that Mr Burley, as a British Conservative MP visiting a country that had lost 550,000 people to the Nazis, and his friends thought it was a good idea to dress their mate up as one.

Now I come to the one good thing that I think we can take from this. And it's only a crumb of good.

If Aidan Burley, as an educated Member of Parliament who works in the building where Winston Churchill said "we shall fight them on the beaches", can have failed to grasp the significance of wearing a Nazi uniform in France, it shows there is a lot of work to do to ensure everyone remembers what so many died for.

Not many people will behave like the members of that stag party, but some might. We are slowly losing people of the generation that lived through the war and rebuilt our country.

This incident is a warning that it is not enough simply to learn facts, figures and numbers about the Second World War. We have to understand what it was like to live and die in it. If we are stopped from falling into a complacency that allows anyone to think of the Nazis simply as comedy villains, rather than the greatest evil of the 20th century, a tiny amount of good can come of this stupid and offensive affair.