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Mr Wiesenthal helped bring more than 1100 Nazi criminals to justice, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which did not give the cause of death.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Los Angeles-based center, described Wiesenthal as “the conscience of the Holocaust”.

Mr Wiesenthal was the world’s most intrepid hunter of Nazi war criminals, bringing more than a thousand to trial in a global campaign to ensure no one forgot the horror of Adolf Hitler’s treatment of the Jews.

* A Jew, Mr Wiesenthal travelled the world into his old age, lecturing on the Holocaust and as director of the Jewish Documentation Centre collecting data on the whereabouts of the last unpunished villains of Nazi Germany.

* Those he helped to catch included major figures such as Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler’s chief henchmen in the campaign to exterminate Jews, and Franz Stangl, ex-commandant of the Treblinka death camp.

* He told Reuters on his 75th birthday in 1983 that he could never rest until he had hunted down the last of the great living killers of the Third Reich – “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele and former SS Colonel Walter Rauff.

* Rauff died of cancer aged 77 in Chile in May 1984, but Mr Wiesenthal went on searching for Mengele until in June 1985 a body exhumed in Brazil was identified as that of the man Mr Wiesenthal said exterminated 400,000 Jews, half of them children, as doctor at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

* When Hitler attacked Russia in 1941 Mr Wiesenthal was among millions of Jews forced into concentration camps. Altogether the Nazis were estimated to have murdered 11 million civilians, including six million Jews.

* Mr Wiesenthal spent four and a half years during World War Two in German concentration camps, including Buchenwald in Bavaria and Mauthausen in Austria. He slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt during this period to avoid torture. Some 89 members of his own family were killed by the Nazis.

* Mr Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908, son of a wealthy Jewish businessman at Buczacz in Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire with a large Jewish population. He attended elementary school in Vienna and high school in Buczacz.

* Asked why he spent his life hunting Nazis, he once said: “I am not a practising Jew. But I do believe.”

* In 1961 Mr Wiesenthal founded the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna which, helped by branches around the world and a network of former concentration camp inmates, was devoted to tracking down Nazis who escaped trial.

* Established in 1977, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre is an international Jewish human rights organisation dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust by fostering tolerance and understanding through community involvement, educational outreach and social action, its website says.

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Under a rule that excludes parties unable to win at least 5 per cent of the vote nationwide, neither the NPD, the allied German People’s Party (DVU) nor any other German rightists have ever managed to enter the Bundestag during the post-World War II era.

On Sunday, the NPD gained less than 2 per cent of the vote in most western states. In a few eastern states, its support ranged higher, between 3 and 4 per cent. The party has been strongest in the eastern state of Saxony.

Some of Saxony’s votes have yet to be cast. In its capital city, Dresden, about half the voters will cast their ballots on October 2, due to a two-week postponement for one of Dresden’s two Bundestag seats after the death of an NPD candidate. Her name must be replaced on the ballots.

The NPD has nominated in her place a nationally known rightist, Franz Schoenhuber, 82, whose books glowingly describe his wartime service in the Nazi regime’s Waffen SS military force.

While either a Social Democrat or Christian Democrat is expected to win the Dresden seat, the right is hoping that it will have optimal conditions to achieve perhaps a fourth place, and by doing so win nationwide attention.

Over the past year, Dresden has emerged as the NPD’s main centre. It is the only capital among Germany’s 16 states with NPD members in the state assembly, who were mainly elected from rural areas of Saxony, not by urban voters.

While agitation by neo-Nazis in Germany often wins worldwide attention, rightist parties have never progressed over the past half century beyond the status of a small minority in German politics.

Juergen Falter of the University of Mainz has surveyed rightist views in Germany’s population. The political scientist said before the general election that German far-right parties can at best win between 5 and 10 per cent of votes nationwide.

The “optimal conditions” for the rightists to achieve that mark at the federal level have never occurred so far, Professor Falter said.

Europe’s far-right is generally seen as having a potential of up to 15 per cent. But unlike rightist movements in Austria, Italy, France and the Netherlands, the German far-right has mainly lacked a single charismatic leader since 1945.

The right is also prone to feuds and splits. Strains are already evident in a one-year-old alliance between the NPD - which is known for its anti-Semitism and links with neo-Nazi youth groups - and the DVU, which is bankrolled by newspaper publisher Gerhard Frey.

The DVU is not on federal ballots this year. Instead, the better organised NPD included DVU activists in its candidate slate.

Professor Falter says the NPD follows a two-pronged strategy, both running in elections and seeking “extra-parliamentary” power on the streets.

One element of rightist street power has been the creation of what neo-Nazis term “liberated zones”, which they claim are “purged” of foreigners.

“[The NPD] is willing to go into alliance with skinheads who intimidate the police and make life unpleasant for foreigners,” said Professor Falter.

Thanks to Germany’s public financing of political parties, the NPD can count on substantial government funding in line with the number of votes it receives.

With the coffers refilled after the election, the party, which only has 5000 to 6000 members, will continue to seek support in its most promising terrain, the former communist east, Professor Falter predicts.

But Gerhard Besier, who heads Dresden’s Hannah Arendt Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism, says things would not stay muted much longer.

“After the setback, there’ll be friction,” said Mr Besier, adding that the DVU and NPD only managed to bury their rivalry and ally in the hope of success.

“Powerful ruptures” are likely to follow failure, he predicted

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