AN academic row has broken out over claims that a former Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conductor has been branded a Nazi sympathiser - despite being a Jew who narrowly escaped death at Belsen concentration camp.

Rudolf Schwarz took up the baton for the orchestra in 1947 after emigrating at the end of World War Two.

His tenure with the BSO came to an end in 1951, when he became principal conductor at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He died in 1994 and is buried in Cornwall.

But now the Times Higher Education Supplement has revealed that Mr Schwarz's stepson, Peter Ohlson, is battling to clear the musician's name after a controversial postgraduate thesis by Bournemouth woman Charlotte Exon.

Mr Ohlson, who helped the then Birmingham University student with her research, told the newspaper that when he read her completed work in 2004, "the sky fell in".

The thesis described Mr Schwarz as "Hitler's willing victim" and puts forward the hypothesis that he "sympathised and collaborated with the Nazi regime".

Dr Exon also asserted that Mr Schwarz, who was Austrian, "like the majority of Germans... undoubtedly welcomed Hitler as the nation's answer to the political and economic chaos", and chose to continue living in Germany instead of emigrating.

Mr Ohlson produced a 700-page dossier highlighting what he claims are omissions, distortions and inaccuracies in the thesis.

But last November Birmingham University's Dean of Arts, Adrian Randall, said the thesis could not be revoked or altered, as it had been passed for a PhD.

"The fact that Dr Exon's thesis contains errors, even highly misleading ones, does not constitute good reason for singling this thesis out for particular treatment," he told Mr Ohlson.

Dr Exon, now believed to be working at an independent school in Gloucestershire, was not available for comment.

In 1936 Mr Schwarz became musical director of the Jewish Cultural Organisation, set up by the government, but it was closed by the Gestapo.

He ended up in Belsen, where he was plucked from the gas chamber queue after an admirer petitioned for a reprieve.