Al Capone, Lester Piggott and Now ... Adolf Hitler

He is better known for invading Poland and starting the second world war.

But Adolf Hitler was also an inveterate tax dodger, it emerged yesterday, who systematically evaded paying his tax bills both before and after he became Germany's dictator.

According to new records discovered in a Munich archive, by the time he became Germany's chancellor in 1933 Hitler owed more than 400,000 Reichsmarks in unpaid taxes.

The money - the equivalent of about €6m (£4.1m) today - was written off the following year under a secret deal with the tax authorities.

Hitler's previously hidden records also document that he first aroused the suspicions of German officials in 1921, shortly after he became Nazi leader.

The Munich tax office politely asked him where he had got the money from after he bought a luxury car. Hitler replied evasively and said he earned only a "modest" income from newspaper articles.

Two years later, after his failed Munich putsch, Hitler was sent to prison, where he wrote his best-selling anti-Semitic autobiography, Mein Kampf.

While behind bars he also ordered another luxury Mercedes.

When he emerged, Germany's finance ministry sent him another letter asking about the car and his assets. Hitler's reply was brief. He claimed he owned only a desk, a bookshelf and few books.

"Researching his records was like a thrilling detective novel," Klaus Dieter-Dubon, who discovered the docu ments in Munich's state archive, said yesterday.

"Hitler paid virtually no income tax. He preached to the nation to put public welfare before self-interest, but behaved himself in the opposite way."

The records also reveal that between 1925 and 1932, as royalties from Mein Kampf began to pile up, Hitler gave his occupation as "writer".

By this stage the tax office had finally lost patience - and demanded that he pay 782 Reichsmarks in back taxes.

Amazingly, Hitler refused - citing the costs of publicity, a chaffeur and private secretary - and asked whether it might be possible to pay in instalments.

The records show that Hitler settled only two taxes promptly and without fuss.

One was for his dogs, which he kept at his summerhouse in Berchtesgarten, the Bavarian mountain resort that became an infamous Nazi HQ, and the other for the church.

In 1930 the Berchtesgarten tax office made a last attempt to claw back some of the 48,472 Reichsmarks Hitler had earned by then from Mein Kampf, without success.

After the Nazis took power, the records show, the tax authorities quietly dropped their campaign, formally annulling all his debts in December 1934.

The head of the Munich tax office, Ludwig Mirre, ruled that as Führer Hitler was constitutionally entitled to pay nothing. Hitler's embarrassing tax debts should remain "hidden", Mr Mirre added.