He said that the role-play “prison” scenario, which is at the centre of his breach of privacy action against the News of the World, involved him and woman B, a fellow German speaker, being dominant to submissive characters who could not understand them.

Mosley, the 68-year-old son of the 1930s Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, said this “added to the excitement of a scenario”.

“German also somehow sounds appropriate for a bossy dominant character. It is a harsh-sounding – rather than a romantic – language.”

He said that at no time did he or woman A, who arranged the “parties”, like the one in a Chelsea basement flat on March 28, ever use the word “Nazi” in their discussions.

“A Nazi theme would be abhorrent to me – and I suspect that none of the women would wish to take part should anyone suggest such a theme.”

Mosley says that his life was devastated by the expose of what the newspaper called a “sick Nazi orgy with five hookers” and is asking for an unprecedented award of punitive exemplary damages.

He has told Mr Justice Eady that Jean, his wife of 48 years, had not known of this aspect of his life.

“In one weekend they have destroyed everything. It is difficult to describe how public this humiliation has been”, he said.

His counsel, James Price QC, has said that the “gross and indefensible intrusion” was made substantially worse by the entirely false suggestion that Mosley, president of the FIA (Federation Internationale de l’Automobile) was playing a concentration camp commandant and a cowering death camp inmate.

News Group Newspapers is strongly contesting the action and argues that publication was justified in the public interest.

Before the court went into private today to view a videotape of a similar scenario, which occurred on March 8, Mr Mosley agreed that the March 28 session involved women wearing black jackets, black boots and a black cap, but denied any Nazi aspect.

“Had I wanted a Nazi scene, I would have said I wanted one and A would have got some of the inexpensive Nazi stuff from the joke shop that provides uniforms and would not have gone to Marks and Spencer and got quite expensive jackets.”

He said that if he had asked for a Nazi theme, he would have been deeply disappointed to be greeted, as he was, with the phrase “Welcome to Chelsea” rather than “Brandenburg Tur”.

Mr Mosley told Mark Warby QC, for the newspaper, that the head-lice checking and shaving involved in the scenario was “the kind of thing these people do all the time”.

“I had never had lice-checking before but went with the flow. I didn’t find it particularly erotic.”

Asked about his speaking “cod German as though he was in a poor World War Two movie”, he said it had nothing to do with the war.