In April, Frankfurt regional court ruled that Dr Anna Hájková, associate professor of modern continental European history at Warwick University, had violated a woman’s dignity by claiming she had a sexual relationship with a Nazi camp guard.

Dr Hájková was prohibited from using the name or photo of the dead woman, in the context of the claim, without her daughter’s permission.

The fine has been imposed, however, because content produced by Dr Hájková, that falls foul of the injunction, had remained online.

A survivor of the Holocaust whose bunk bed was opposite the woman’s in a concentration camp in Hamburg told The Guardian that she had never seen anything suggesting a physical relationship between the two women.

“When [the guard] came in the evenings she sat on [Gerda’s] bunk with her back to me,” she said.

“I could see [her] legs. They talked and sometimes laughed. But there was no chance of undressing or anything like that.”

Dr Hájková’s’ work acknowledged there was no proof of a lesbian affair.

The academic said such relationships were omitted from historical records because of homophobia but the survivor said that such relationships “were not unheard of but in [her] case it was not true”.

She said: “A prisoner cannot afford to reject a warden who is interested in you. You hope she will help you to be put to easier work and maybe sneak some food to them.”

The daughter of the deceased woman said: “The fact that Dr Hájková failed to interview one of the few living Holocaust survivors who witnessed the events she was researching was inexplicable.

“I was very disappointed and angry that she didn’t conduct her research professionally and caused me so much pain and distress.”