Rudy Kennedy led the important but largely unsuccessful battle for compensation fought for five years in the 1990s by British survivors of the Nazi policy of “extermination through labour”. The primary objective, he insisted, was not money but “to uncover and spread the truth”. He was shocked by the distortions and denials by the German Government, by the companies that had employed slave labour willingly during the Second World War, and by many historians.

Rudy Karmeinsky was born in 1927 in Roseberg near Breslau (now the Polish city of Wroclaw but then in German Silesia). By the time he went to school, Hitler was in power and he was the only Jew in his class. He was expelled after he resisted the bullying by other schoolchildren.

For his bar mitzvah he was given an electric train set. It was to save his life and shape his career. In March 1943, when he, aged 15, was sent with his parents and younger sister to Auschwitz, he was able to obtain work as an electrician in the Buna factory operated by IG Farben within the Auschwitz complex. By avoiding the normal backbreaking toil, and by working indoors, he was able to survive for nearly two years.

In January 1945, as the Russian advance neared Auschwitz, Kennedy was marched in harrowing winter conditions to Dora-Mittelbau, an underground camp where V1 and V2 rockets were manufactured under Werner von Braun. From Dora he was moved to Belsen, where, severely emaciated, he was liberated by British troops.

He was permitted to go to London in 1946 because an aunt was living there. He took the name of the British officer who had informed his aunt about his survival. Stricken by the loss of the rest of her family, she committed suicide soon afterwards. Kennedy survived tuberculosis, went to college and once again used his electrical skills to work for English Electric on rocket guidance systems.

After the company was visited by a group of US rocket scientists that included some of his German slave-masters from Dora-Mittelbau, reinstated as scientists working for the US rocket programme, he left English Electric and joined Rolf Schild, who had come to Britain as a child refugee from Nazi Germany, and Peter Epstein, in a venture in rocketry and then in medical engineering. The company was later to develop into the £200 million Huntleigh Electronics. In the 1970s Kennedy formed his own company, Digital Electronics, and, after selling it, joined the board of Roche Pharmaceuticals.

With homes in London and the South of France, Kennedy seemed well set for a comfortable retirement when he visited Auschwitz in 1995. Like many Holocaust survivors he had repressed the terrible memories of his youth and had not been active in organisations of Jewish refugees. Now, he finally discovered the fate of his father, whom he had last seen in a state of exhaustion and suffering from dysentery after two months at Buna-Auschwitz. His father’s last act had been to secure his son the electrician’s job that had saved his life. Kennedy discovered in the camp records that Ewald Karmeinsky had been murdered by an injection of prussic acid.

He then devoted his considerable resources to a campaign to force the German companies that had co-operated in the Nazi “Extermination through Labour” programme to face up to their past. IG Farben had been broken up after the war into successor firms such as Hoechst and Bayer. Not only did these companies and many like them deny all legal responsibility, but also the academic accounts that were emerging (often financed by the companies themselves) were distorted. A historian of IG Farben admitted that he had spent a decade on a work about the company without interviewing a former slave labourer.

Kennedy subsidised a film of his campaign, shown by the BBC in its Storyville series. He became a driving force in a committee for Jewish Slave Labour Compensation, with the artist Roman Halter, Freddie Knoller and Ron Leaton. With pro bono legal support from Anthony Julius, and from the academics Michael Pinto-Duschinsky and Nina Staehle, he arranged meetings with three successive German ambassadors to London. He travelled to France, Austria, Germany and the US. He was not allowed into the annual meeting of IG Farben shareholders and was barred from another meeting in Vienna.

When he told one German ambassador to London of his working conditions in Auschwitz, the ambassador replied that “strictly speaking” the Nazis had done “nothing illegal”, until he was corrected by the legal counsellor at the embassy. The German authorities eventually changed their position — accepting that the use of forced labour had contravened international law — but they held that victims had no rights to sue.

The hostility that Kennedy encountered from the Jewish Establishment was even greater than that from some historians and German officials. Neither the main Jewish institutions that claimed to represent Holocaust survivors nor the Israeli Government appeared interested in securing payments for individual survivors, seemingly preferring to negotiate with the German authorities for money for their own organisations.

After a series of frustrations, Kennedy’s campaign group was approached by a firm of US class-action lawyers that held out the promise of obtaining damages in US courts against the companies that had employed slave labourers under the Nazis. Members of the UK group agreed to sign up as clients. Later Kennedy regretted this decision. The US lawyers, most of whom claimed to be acting free of charge, eventually accepted millions of dollars for themselves in return for settling the case on terms that gave little to the survivors. The Clinton Administration also put pressure on the survivors’ lawyers and on the US Jewish Establishment to agree to a deal.

When Kennedy’s displeasure at the proposed settlement became known, one of his US lawyers obtained an assurance from the Clinton Administration’s negotiator that Kennedy could have tea with the President at the White House in return for accepting the terms. Kennedy refused. It was only the help of the legal counsellor at the German Embassy in London that enabled him to attend the Berlin meeting at which the agreement was announced so that he could make his objections known to the press.

Survivors of slave labour at Auschwitz and other Nazi camps were to receive a maximum of about £5,000 for their work and their sufferings. This would be given as a goodwill gesture without any admission of legal responsibility by the German Government or by the companies for which they had been forced to toil. Survivors had to sign away all their legal rights. A particularly galling condition was that money would be earmarked for a German-controlled foundation for public relations events and for historical studies that were unlikely to represent the victims’ version of events.

Kennedy was determined to fight on, refusing to accept the pittance on offer. He remained active, speaking at schools and protesting at Farben shareholders’ meetings. He stopped speaking in public only when his memory started failing and he was told that he had Alzheimer’s.

Kennedy was unfailingly polite and calm. He worked naturally with German supporters and he was concerned about recent genocide and human rights abuses in countries such as Rwanda and Bosnia. He attributed his own strength and determination to his early, happy family life.

His wife, Gitti, and two of their three children survive him.

Rudy Kennedy, Holocaust survivor, scientist and campaigner, was born on October 27, 1927. He died on November 10, 2008, aged 81