Hitler fled the ruins of the Third Reich and lived with a black woman in Brazil hunting for buried treasure, according to the latest theory to claim that the dictator survived the war.

According to postgraduate student Simoni Renee Guerreiro Dias, the Fuhrer actually died in South America in 1984, aged 95.

In her book Hitler in Brazil - His Life and His Death, Guerreiro Dias claims that Hitler fled from Europe to Argentina and then to Paraguay, and finally to the Brazillian state of Mato Grosso, where he lived as Adolf Leipzig, known locally as the 'Old German'.

Guerreiro Dias claims that she became aware of Hitler's true fate when she drew a Hitler moustache on a photograph of ageing Leipzig, who was from her native village.

In order to conceal his identity as a racist ideologue convinced of Aryan superiority, Hitler lived with a black woman called Cutinga, Guerreiro Dias maintains.

From the small town of Nossa Senhora do Livramento, 30 miles from the state capital Cuiaba, where he lived, Hitler launched expeditions to recover buried Jesuit treasure, armed with maps provided by the Vatican, Guerreiro Dias claims.

She now intends to prove that Leipzig was Hitler, using DNA samples from a relative of the dictator living in Israel.

For years, conspiracy theorists have alleged that Hitler followed 'Architect of the Holocaust' Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele Auschwitz's 'Angel of Death' and fled Europe for Latin America.

Candido Moreira Rodrigues, a history professor at Mato Grosso's Federal University, has poured scorn on the theory.

"There's nothing new in people who claim to be historians coming up with the most far-reaching theories about Hitler supposedly living in south America and subsequently dying in one of the countries in this region," he said.

South America is not the only destination Hitler is alleged to have escaped to.

Previously it has been alleged that Hitler left Germany for Antarctica, and some claim he fled the planet altogether and lived on the Moon after the war, on a secret Nazi space base.

In 2011, the authors of Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler argued that Hitler lived in Patagonia, Argentina, and had two children with his mistress Eva Braun, before dying in 1962 at the age of 73.