New Zealand historian Joel Hayward - who caused a furore with a 1993 thesis that questioned the validity of Holocaust history - is now a senior academic at the heart of the British defence establishment.
Hayward, 44, is now Dean of the Royal Air Force College at Cranbourne, in England - where Prince William is undergoing pilot training, the Jewish Chronicle reported today.
The London-based publication, the world's oldest Jewish paper, said Hayward was appointed last year after two years as head of the Air Power Studies Division created by the RAF and King's College, London.
He has lived and worked in the UK since 2004, first teaching strategy at the Joint Services Command and Staff College.
Hayward was at the centre of a bitter controversy in 1993 when there were public calls for Canterbury University to revoke his MA, based on a thesis entitled The Fate of Jews in German Hands: An Historical Inquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism.
The 360-page document, which won praise from, among others, Holocaust denier David Irving, alleged that there was never an official Nazi policy to exterminate Jews in gas chambers and questioned whether six million Jews were killed.
Irving, recently jailed in Austria over Holocaust denial charges, described Hayward as "New Zealand's leading Holocaust historian".
The university ordered an official inquiry into the thesis, and in 2000, described it as "seriously flawed" and said its conclusions about the Holocaust were "perverse and unjustified".
Hayward issued an apology in which he withdrew his conclusions and "regretted working on such a complex topic without sufficient knowledge and preparation".
Kings College vice-principal and war studies professor Sir Lawrence Freedman said: "I would be the last person to have an active Holocaust denier on my staff, but this is about a man who, when he was young, wrote a master's thesis which he has now recanted."
Hayward told the newspaper: "It was so long ago. Life is a learning process and one learns from one's mistakes as a young man."
There were some in New Zealand who still bore a grudge, despite his apology and recantation of his thesis, he said.
