A SECRET account of Nazi monster Heinrich Himmler’s cyanide suicide has been revealed in the war diaries of a former Durham Light Infantry soldier.

Corporal Harry Oughton Jones wrote of his classified encounter with the architect of the Jewish Holocaust at a prison camp in Germany at the end of the Second World War.

Unknown to the British, among the German soldiers captured after the Nazi surrender was the Gestapo chief, disguised with a sergeant’s uniform and a patch over one eye.

But his ruse was blown by his own comrades, who informed their captors of Himmler’s identity.

Cpl Jones, from Heselden, near Sunderland, who was 27 at the time, and an officer were tasked with challenging Himmler. When they did, on May 23, 1945, the day after his capture, he bit on a cyanide capsule and dropped dead.

Contrary to common belief that his final words were “I am Heinrich Himmler”, he displayed the sort of arrogance typical of the Nazi regime.

Cpl Jones wrote: “The officer and I stood in the doorway and the officer said ‘we have reason to believe you are a German officer of the SS and we have been told that you are Himmler’.

“At this he laughed and said ‘you my boy are just a young captain and to take me I want to see your colonel in charge’.

“So at once the officer said to me to take him, as we made to get him he just put his hand to his mouth and before we got to him he dropped dead on one of the beds and kicked two or three times and then lay still.”

Two days later and under the cover of darkness, Cpl Jones helped bury Himmler in an unmarked grave on Luneburg Heath, in northern Germany.

He had earlier been posted there as Field Marshal Montgomery’s bodyguard and was present at the official German surrender on May 4, 1945.

He was made to sign the Official Secrets Act and warned never to speak of the matter again, but wrote his account in 1988, aged 70.

The episode has been classified by the Ministry of Defence until 2045, 100 years after the event.

But the actual circumstances of Himmler’s demise have now emerged after Cpl Jones’ recent death at the age of 92 in Australia, where he had emigrated with his family in 1959.

His grandson, Jason Renshaw, 34, who lives in Newcastle, New South Wales, had previously read his grandfather’s war diaries, but only chose to make them public after his death.

He said: “I read his diaries when I was a bit younger and was blown away by them. To think my grandfather, just a feller from County Durham, was involved in a historic moment like that.”