According to reports, he first fled from his home in Germany to Spain, where he stayed with his patron, former Nazi Gen. Otto Ernst Remer, who put down the 1944 attempted putsch against Hitler.

However, Rudolf decided to move on when he suspected that the German authorities had discovered his Spanish hideout and he arrived in Britain in 1996.

Since then, he told a London newspaper that tracked him down over the weekend, he has been working "as a Holocaust revisionist 24 hours a day."

His work has brought him into contact with far-right political groups and with Holocaust revisionist historian David Irving. He said he considered himself to be a "political prisoner" in Germany and had fled to Britain "because I wanted to be free."