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Documents suggesting that Hans Asperger, who gave his name to a form of autism, was a Nazi collaborator have shocked the world.

The Austrian paediatrician is even said to have helped Hitler’s regime murder disabled children by choosing who would be killed.

Dr Asperger isn’t the only household name whose dark secrets have come to light in recent years. From designers to chocolate makers, some world famous people had a very questionable past...

Coco Chanel

She may be praised as a fashion icon who revolutionised the way the world thinks about clothes but she was also a traitor.

The French designer was a Nazi spy who shared a bed with a senior Gestapo officer and tried to convince Britain to end the war.

(Image: Roger Viollet)

She is said to have worked for Hitler’s military intelligence ­division while the German army slaughtered her countrymen.

Given the codename Westminster, she passed information on potential agents who could be recruited to aid Hitler, according to biographer Hal Vaughan.

She was reportedly spared a trial, and likely execution, because Winston Churchill intervened to save her. She died in 1971 aged 87.

Henry Ford

The founder of the Ford Motor Company invented the modern factory, turning cars into something affordable.

He was also a vile anti-Semite.

(Image: Universal Images Group Editorial)

In 1918 he became the owner of a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and filled it with articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting the US.

In 1938, nine years before his death aged 83, the American received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal Nazi Germany awarded to foreign citizens.

Dr John Harvey Kellogg

The inventor of Corn Flakes was a terrifying Christian fundamentalist who believed that sex – even with your spouse – was immoral.

(Image: Archive Photos)

He thought sexual relationships damaged a person’s physical and emotional well-being. He never consummated his own marriage.

His twisted obsession with sin resulted in thousands of patients being caged in his “sanatorium” where they were dunked in freezing water and given shock treatment. Kellogg died in 1943, aged 91.

Alfred Nobel

He is best known for founding the awards given in his name such as the Nobel Peace Prize.

But the prizes were his attempt to make amends for his time as an arms dealer.

(Image: Hulton Archive)

In addition to inventing dynamite, the Swedish chemist, who died in 1896 aged 63, made his fortune producing gunpowder and cannons.

He donated his money to good causes after reading an obituary accidentally published while he was still alive which said he profited from suffering.

Hugo Boss

Coco Chanel wasn’t the only fashion designer to benefit from a relationship with the Nazis. But where Coco worked largely behind the scenes, Hugo Boss made a fortune producing uniforms for the Nazi Party.

During the Second World War he employed 140 forced labourers to boost the company’s profits, and had a picture of himself with Hitler hanging on his wall.

After the war, Boss was considered “a beneficiary” of the Nazi state and stripped of his voting rights. He died at 63 in 1948, after a tooth abscess.

In 2011 the company apologised, saying it “profoundly regretted those who suffered harm or hardship at the factory run by Hugo Boss under National Socialist rule”.

Cecil Rhodes

One of the most ambitious and brutal imperialists of the 19th century, the British businessman stuck his name on everything.

He conquered and annexed large parts of Southern Africa to found Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia).

(Image: GETTY)

An avowed racist, he believed white people were the world’s natural leaders and the more of the globe Britain ruled “the better it is for the human race”.

Rhodes University in South Africa is named after him, as are the Rhodes Scholarships.

Statues of him stand at the University of Cape Town and Oxford University.

His murderous legacy was recently propelled into the headlines again after students from across the world demanded the tearing down of memorials to Rhodes, who died in 1902 at 48.

Georges Gilles de la Tourette

Georges Gilles discovered the syndrome named after him in 1884, after diagnosing a series of verbal and physical tics in nine patients under his care.

But despite defining a major medical condition, he wasn’t popular with his patients.

In 1893 a woman he was treating shot him in the head (though it was a super­ficial wound).

She claimed to have been driven mad after being hypnotised by Tourette.

The Frenchman survived the attack but died in 1904, aged 46, in a psychiatric hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland.

William Boeing

He founded the Boeing Airplane Company in 1917 – years before others recognised how lucrative aviation would become.

He was also a racist.

In his native Seattle in the US, William guaranteed bank loans to developers to build thousands of homes... on the condition they were not sold to black families.

Also, houses on his land were subject to bylaws he wrote that forbade the sale or lease of the homes to anyone who wasn’t white. Boeing died in 1956 aged 74.

William Cadbury

Eighty years after anti-slavery campaigner John Cadbury founded Cadbury’s in 1824, it was run by his grandson William.

With William as boss in the 1900s, the firm was importing half its cocoa from the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, where people worked in horrific conditions in what was effectively slave labour.

After several years of ­stonewalling on calls to ditch slave-cultivated cocoa, he did stop it but only after political upheaval made access to the islands ­difficult. William died in 1957 at 90.