outsiders, where they could scorn liberals and proclaim their true beliefs.

Over the past five years Stein's organisation, Republican Party Animals, drew hundreds to regular events in and around Los Angeles, making him a darling of conservative blogs and talkshows. That he made respected documentaries on the Holocaust added intellectual cachet and Jewish support to Stein's cocktail of politics, irreverence and rock and roll.

There was just one problem. Stein was not who he claimed. His real name can be revealed for the first time publicly – a close circle of confidants only found out the truth recently – as David Cole. And under that name he was once a reviled Holocaust revisionist who questioned the existence of Nazi gas chambers. As a combative twentysomething with tousled black hair, he was a vilified guest on chat shows hosted by Phil Donahue, Montel Williams and Morton Downey, among others, and was depicted as a neo-Nazi on news shows such as 60 Minutes and 48 Hours. There was a death threat from the Jewish Defense League, a militant, violent group. In January 1998, wanting to start anew, Cole wrote a letter to the JDL, recanting his views.

The threat was lifted. Cole adopted the name Stein, chosen because it was simple and short, he said. Only a few close friends knew the secret. He changed identities in January 1998. "That was when David Cole officially expired," he told the Guardian in an interview this week. "That was the end of Cole. Or so I thought. That was when David Stein was brought into this world. For 15 years I have been David Stein. Now the genie is out of the bottle. I'm done. I'm finished. I'm not going to try to remain as David Stein.

Cole agreed to meet the Guardian in order to give his side of the story. He was rueful at being outed and wry about his future. "I don't expect many people at my birthday party this year," he said. The recanting was fake, he said. Cole today still challenges established Holocaust scholarship, including the certainty about Nazi gas chambers. 

Born in 1968 in Los Angeles to liberal, secular-minded Jewish parents, Cole's father, Leon, was a doctor who became controversial for introducing Elvis Presley to Demerol. "He was accused of hooking Elvis on drugs, of killing Elvis." Cole did not go to university – "I wanted to begin working" – but by the 1980s he had become fascinated by political ideology, especially the work of fringe scholars known then as Holocaust revisionists, subsequently renamed denialists. He became convinced that on some points they were right and that as a Jew, he would undertake a quixotic quest to "correct" the historical record, arguing that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp .

As Stein, however, he shielded his views, not least during the next stage of his career odyssey: the maker of respectable, conventional Holocaust documentaries. He knew the subject, needed an income and US schools and universities had budgets to commission such projects. He said: "I gave mainstream audiences what they wanted." Cole's mistake, he said, was to confide his secret to a friend with whom he fell out. The friend went "nuclear" and outed him to their conservative circle.

Besieged by followers demanding answers, Cole last week shut down much of his online presence and retreated from view. A farewell note on his blog announced the end of his involvement with Republican Party Animals, saying he had been "assassinated" by "an exceptionally vindictive young lady". 

Holocaust experts and Jewish groups who remembered Cole from the 1990s expressed astonishment that he had resurfaced and still professed Holocaust revisionism.

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