Last updated at 09:12 22 August 2007

In his cut-down SS uniform, Alex Kurzem made a perfect mascot. Hitler's high command gave him a rifle and he was pictured in newsreels as "the Reich's youngest Nazi".

They even paraded the six-year-old before Adolf Hitler, who hailed him as an upstanding example to German youth.

But the boy soldier had a secret that he kept for more than 60 years - he was Jewish.

Today Mr Kurzem lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has told his amazing story in a book The Mascot, which will stun any former Nazis still alive.

"They gave me little jobs to do, polishing shoes or lighting a fire," he said yesterday. "They thought I was a Russian orphan."

His parents had been killed when Germans invaded their village in Belarussia and Alex survived for months by begging for food.

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Eventually he was found by Latvian police who became part of the SS. He remembers executions and expecting to be one of the victims.

But a soldier took him around to the back of the local school and told him: "Look, I don't want to kill you but I can't leave you here. I will take you with me and tell the other soldiers that you are a Russian orphan."

Alex kept his secret and was later "adopted" by the SS. In 1944, with defeat inevitable, the Nazis sent him to live with a Latvian family.

As a teenager he made his way to Australia where he married and had two children. But only now, at 71, has he told anyone his story.