Oxford University sparked outrage by accepting millions in donations from a family trust controlled by the late Max Mosley, the son of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. 

Yesterday, the Daily Mail revealed how former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger personally solicited funds from Mosley while principal of Lady Margaret Hall and how Oxford quietly rewarded Mosley with a prestigious honour. 

In part two of our investigation, we reveal shocking new details unearthed from British and overseas intelligence files about the Nazi and fascist origins of the Mosley family's fortune.

As they polish their bons mots over the vintage port at High Table, those Oxford luminaries who begged for donations from the Mosley family might care to ruminate on the horrific extent to which that money is dripping in blood…

That Max Mosley, via a secretive Liechtenstein Trust, inherited his father Oswald's fortune, he freely admitted.

What is less known, but was discoverable by any diligent researcher at Oxford's Bodleian library, is that this fortune was based on money given to Mosley by Mussolini and Hitler (something Oswald and his wife Diana lied about for decades), ransoms paid by Jews to avoid the death camps, and, after the war, extensive and lucrative dealings with the Fuhrer's henchmen and other anti-Semites – dealings in which Max was involved.

While there was ample evidence of Mosley's fascist funding already in the public domain when Oxford did their due diligence, the Mail's investigation has uncovered historically significant new material to show this money was then further tainted by father and son's business dealings with surviving Nazis, and investments by both in South Africa's racist apartheid regime.

Our evidence for much of this was obtained from previously classified documents held by MI5, MI6, Special Branch, the CIA and government archives in Switzerland, Ireland, Belgium, France, and South Africa – as well as testimony from two surviving members of Sir Oswald's post-war Union Movement.

While the Mosley family fortune was founded on land ownership in Lancashire, dating back to Tudor times, by the early 1930s Sir Oswald had run up overdrafts due to legal bills.

That he was able to restore his fortunes and those of his party, the British Union of Fascists, was in no small part courtesy of money provided by Europe's murderous dictators.

Special Branch files seen by the Mail show that Mosley opened a secret account at the Westminster Bank Charing Cross in March 1933 to receive illicit funds from Mussolini – via cash contained in suitcases stuffed with foreign currency.

The first of these cash gifts was handed to Sir Oswald personally. Over two years, Mosley received £60,000 – worth around £3.5million in today's money. When donations from Mussolini dried up in 1936, Mosley turned to the Nazis.

On June 19, 1936, Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels recorded in his diary: 'Mosley needs money… wants it from us. Has already had £2,000 … £100,000 necessary... £60,000 promised. Must submit to Fuhrer.'

Hitler's response was not recorded, but the following day Goebbels wrote 'got hold of £10k for Mosley'. Arrangements were made for it to be smuggled to Mosley using a 'fanatic Nazi' posing as a foreign correspondent in London.

The Ransomed Rothschild

In March 1938, following the Anschluss – Hitler's annexation of Austria – Louis Nathaniel, Baron de Rothschild, a member of the Jewish banking family, was held by the Nazis in Vienna.

According to evidence later obtained by MI5 and examined by the Mail at Britain's National Archives, members of the Rothschild family contacted Oliver Hoare, a member of a British banking family, to ask Sir Oswald for 'his assistance in this matter'

In 1942 Bill Allen, one of Mosley's pre-war business partners, was interrogated by Francis Aikin-Smeath of MI5 who reported that Allen told him: 'One indirect means of obtaining money through the Germans had been in connection with the 'ransoming' of Louis de Rothschild…

'The idea was that Mosley should get the Germans to release Louis de Rothschild and for this he would be paid £40,000 by the Rothschilds in Paris.

'Mosley insisted that he should be paid £120,000 [worth £7.1million today according to the Bank of England inflation calculator]. Allen was brought in as an intermediary in this business and he contacted a Belgian [far-Right] financier … who was to receive the money for Mosley. The [Belgians] were to receive 25 per cent and Mosley 75 per cent.'

Allen dropped out of the negotiations but heard that Diana Mosley – a notorious Nazi sympathiser whose sister Unity Mitford was close to Hitler – went to Berlin to see Himmler who gave orders for Rothschild's release. The £120,000 was then paid to the Belgians by the Rothschilds in Paris in accordance with the agreement. 'Allen knew that shortly after this, Mosley's financial position was improved so that he was able to pay off an overdraft,' MI5 reported.

Swiss Nazi Gold

Oswald and Diana, along with other British fascists, were interned for much of the war. After it ended, Mosley moved to the Republic of Ireland and established bank accounts in Dublin and with Barclays in Paris, thus bypassing strict British exchange controls.

On June 3, 1951, Mosley drove his British-registered Allard sports car (reg LXO 505) from Paris to Zurich with Diana. They checked into the five-star Hotel Schweizerhof, according to previously classified documents in the Swiss Federal Archive and released following a request by the Mail.

Acting on a tip-off from MI6, Swiss police placed Mosley under surveillance and tapped his hotel phone. The next morning, Mosley told the hotel receptionist he was returning to France. Instead, he slipped his surveillance tail and headed to Basel with Diana for a clandestine meeting with high-ranking neo-Nazis.

Swiss agents later confirmed the rendezvous included former SS commander Alfred Franke-Gricksch, leader of the revivalist 'German Brotherhood'; the notorious Luftwaffe ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a key figure in the post-war 'ratlines' escape network for on-the-run Nazis; Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, a prominent Swiss racist; and other far-Right politicians from Germany and Switzerland.

According to a Swiss intelligence report, the meeting's aim was 'to discuss the possibilities of international unification of Brotherhood groups in all parts of the world'. The Mail can reveal the Swiss government was so concerned about Mosley's post-war dealing with Nazis he was banned from entering the country for life except, on one occasion, in a 'sealed' train transiting the territory.

Mosley, aided by Diana's fluent German, also sought to profit from pan-European publishing ventures promoting banned neo-Nazi propaganda. Irish military intelligence files examined by the Mail reveal that Diana Mosley arranged a £50 [worth £1,350 in today's money] 'advance royalty' payment to Rudel, Nazi Germany's most decorated fighter pilot. It was to prove a shrewd investment.

Rudel's war record was formidable. Having flown more than 2,500 combat missions, mostly on the Soviet front, he was credited with destroying 519 tanks, 150 artillery positions and 800 vehicles.

Luftwaffe records also credit him with disabling three major warships and 70 smaller craft. For this, Hitler awarded him a unique honour: The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds.

Rudel survived multiple crashes and injuries but lost a leg in April 1945. Captured by Allied forces, he was released from a PoW camp in April 1946. But he quickly became a central figure in the Odessa network – the so-called 'ratlines' – which helped Nazi fugitives escape to South America. His books were banned in Germany due to his unwavering Nazi views.

It was the Mosleys who commissioned the English translation of Rudel's memoir, Stuka Pilot, and persuaded British war hero Douglas Bader to write the foreword.

The book became Mosley's most commercially successful publication. First released by his Euphorion Books imprint in 1952, it was reprinted six times before being picked up by Transworld and reissued under their Corgi label in 1957.

Max Mosley was involved with his father in neo-fascist activity from at least the age of 16.

Indeed, we can reveal, in the spring of 1962 he was one of five like-minded individuals who met on the Grand Canal terrace of the Europa Hotel in Venice.

Present were Sir Oswald Mosley, 22-year-old Max, Rudel, the huge scar-faced Otto Skorzeny, the Waffen SS commando leader who had rescued the deposed Mussolini from his mountaintop prison in 1943, and a lone woman, Gudrun Burwitz, the still fervently Nazi daughter of the late Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust.

Max doesn't mention his own presence at this gathering in his 2015 autobiography. Nor that on his way to Venice he stopped off at the former Dachau concentration camp with three other British fascists, one of whom wanted to write offensive comments in the museum visitors' book.

Details of the Venice meeting and the visit to Dachau were provided to the Mail by a live witness, Barry Ayres, Oswald Mosley's official driver who accompanied Max on the journey.

Throughout this period, Oswald continued to maintain a business relationship with a notorious Swiss neo-Nazi financier. Francois Genoud had been a member of the Swiss Nazi Party and worked for German military intelligence during the war.

Post-1945, he helped run the Odessa network and continued to manage the secret Swiss-held treasures of the Third Reich, most of which had been stolen from Jews.

He had also secured the posthumous rights to the writings of Hitler, Goebbels and Martin Bormann. His Lausanne home was a shrine to the Third Reich. Historian Stephen Dorril, who uncovered Mosley's payments from Hitler, was told by informed sources that Mosley 'invested funds' with Genoud.

By the mid-1950s the CIA, playing a double game of hunting Nazi criminals while recruiting former Abwher agents to join the fight against communism, was also monitoring Mosley's sinister circle.

A 61-page 1953 CIA file marked 'SECRET' and titled 'German Nationalist and Neo-Nazi Activities in Argentina' includes references to Mosley in connection to an international conspiracy by what the CIA calls 'hard-core Nazis' who 'appear to have a certain optimism about the future, and appear to have ample financial backing'.

The file singles out rabid Nazis such as Otto Skorzeny and the air ace Rudel and notes Mosley's connections with Professor Maurice Bardeche – a French art critic and journalist later viewed as the 'father-figure of Holocaust denial'. The CIA reports: 'Bardeche allegedly controls a capital fund of 300million French francs ... in collaboration with Mosley.'

MI5, MI6 and the British defence intelligence HQ in Germany were also increasingly alarmed at Mosley's dealings with Genoud, who from his Swastika-lined apartment in Lausanne later financed Arab terror groups to attack Israel, personally organised hijackings of Western airliners and funded the legal defences of Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, the 'Butcher-of-Lyon' Klaus Barbie, and international terrorist Carlos the Jackal.

Mosley's personal MI5 files from 1951 onwards are still classified and MI6 never directly releases its own records.

However, verbatim extracts have emerged in other documents the Mail has obtained about key figures in Mosley's fascist orbit.

In 1953, for example, the British Services Security Organisation in Germany informed MI5 and MI6 that Mosley had helped Genoud secure a business deal for a Swiss company in South Africa where Mosley had high-level contacts.

These included the pro-Nazi Oswald Pirow, a minister in the South African government with whom Mosley collaborated on a plan for apartheid across the whole African continent to be known as 'Eurafrica'.

The Swiss Nazi Genoud took his own life in 1996. Shortly before – as investigators searching for 'Nazi gold' finally closed in on him – he told the French writer Pierre Pean that Mosley had sent him a total of 93 letters between 1950 and 1957 and kept him 'informed of all his political and financial peregrinations'.

'My views have not changed since I was a young man. Hitler was a great leader, and if he had won the war the world would be a better place today,' Genoud said in 1992.

Had details of Hitler's handouts to Oswald Mosley been revealed after the war it would have finished any hope of a political revival by him in the UK. But it was not until 2002, long after his death in 1980, that papers recording his treachery were released and lodged with the Wiener Holocaust Library in London.

And by the end of the 1950s Sir Oswald – thanks, in part, to his lucrative deals with neo-Nazis – had successfully rebuilt his financial empire and had properties in London, Paris and Ireland.

Perhaps his shrewdest investment was to transfer almost all his wealth into the stock market of apartheid South Africa, a decision he announced in the Rand Daily Mail. Throughout the 1960s the Johannesburg exchange was one of the world's best performing markets – largely thanks to profits made by the mining companies who brutally exploited black workers.

Meanwhile, both Oswald and the ever-loyal Max denounced financial boycotts of the South African regime and called for global apartheid and the expulsion of 'coloured' immigrants from the UK.

One of Sir Oswald's closest business contacts was the chairman of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Tony Fergusson.

It was Fergusson to whom Oswald wrote to introduce his son Max – who openly supported apartheid while at Oxford – when the latter launched his Formula One career in South Africa in 1970. The subsequent purchase of the Kyalami race circuit near Johannesburg in 1980 became the cornerstone of the £6billion motorsport empire Max created with Bernie Ecclestone.

The deal was negotiated personally by Max with representatives of the apartheid regime at a time when the country faced sporting boycotts and sanctions.

Indeed, Oswald Mosley's 'Action' newsletter devoted its front page to an attack on these sanctions at the same time Max was negotiating the Kyalami deal.

It should be noted by defenders of Max Mosley, such as the achingly liberal ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who tweeted that he was 'saddened' by his death, that black South Africans were excluded from the circuit.

Pictures that reveal true face of Max the street thug 

In February 1958 thugs from Oswald Mosley's Union Movement attacked a Conservative political meeting in Islington at which Tory party chairman Lord Hailsham was due to speak.

A picture subsequently published in the Daily Mail showed a man – possibly a Tory steward – being held in a headlock while he was attacked by two of the fascist bully boys.

The report failed to identify the pair, who were, in fact, Sir Oswald's teenage sons Alexander and Max.

Later that year, violence between white Teddy Boy gangs and black residents of Notting Hill, West London, broke out over the August bank holiday and continued for several nights. The homes of West Indians were firebombed and blacks 'savagely beaten'.

On September 4, the Daily Sketch published a photograph of the Mosley brothers in Notting Hill. The knuckle of one of Max's fists appears to be cut while his other knuckle is covered by a plaster.

Max told a reporter: 'All we want to do is pacify these people. I don't believe in all this violence. But we do want to see a lot of these negroes out of our country.'

The following spring, Sir Oswald fanned the flames when he announced he would stand as an MP for the local constituency which included Notting Hill, in that year's general election. In street corner meetings – attended by Max – Sir Oswald would tell his rabble rousers: 'As they say my friends, 'Lassie [a dog food] for dogs, Kitty Kat [cat food] for w*gs'.'

On May 17, 1959, a young West Indian, Kelso Cochrane, was stabbed to death in Notting Hill by a gang of white youths. The killers were never caught. Sir Oswald held a Union Movement rally on the spot where the murder took place. 'The election was fun…' Max was later quoted as saying.

While an undergraduate at Oxford – and on the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in which 69 blacks including ten children were shot dead by apartheid South African police in 1960 – Max joined an armed Mosleyite mob sent to intimidate peaceful protesters in Trafalgar Square.

Mosley's thugs – who arrived in a lorry carrying the slogan 'Mosley for White Britain' – carried six lengths of lead, a mallet and four pick-axe handles. Max was arrested, convicted and fined for obstructing a policeman. Fellow undergraduates had been expelled for lesser offences, but the Oxford authorities took no public action.