MADRID: For almost 30 years Enric Marco was a living witness to the thousands of exiled leftwing Spaniards who ended up in Nazi concentration camps. After he revealed how he had been arrested in Vichy France and imprisoned in the camps in the Second World War, his plight symbolised the human cost of a secret alliance between Hitler and the Spanish dictator General Franco. He had been chosen by fellow survivors of the camps, where more than 8,000 Spaniards died, to represent them as they sought, after decades of silence under Franco, to tell their story and demand compensation.

Several times a week Mr Marco would recount his tale to classrooms of schoolchildren, journalists and, recently, the Spanish parliament.

“They were not mad, or sadistic, they were worse than that, they were bureaucrats of a fascist Europe that believed it would last for a thousand years,” he told the parliament in Madrid this year. Spanish leftwingers in France had, he said, been rounded up by the Gestapo and sent to camps where the survival rate was little more than one in four.

On Wednesday, however, Mr Marco admitted that he had made up the story. He was not prisoner number 6,448 in the the Mauthausen and Flossenburg camps. He had not even left Spain at the start of the war to join the French resistance. Instead of being released from imprisonment by the allies in 1945, he returned to Spain in 1943 after spending two years in Germany, working in Hitler’s armaments factories.

“It is deformed biography, which does not conform to reality,” he admitted to Barcelona’s TV3 television station on Wednesday. Mr Marco insisted that he had only “half-lied”. He had been held by the Gestapo for months and charged with treason, he claimed. “All I have done is change the scenario.”

He was due to attend the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war this week, together with Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, at the Mauthausen camp in Austria. But his fellow concentration camp survivors sent him home after Mr Marco’s tale — first told in a 1978 autobiography called Memoir of Hell — was revealed to be a lie by a university researcher, Benito Bermejo.

“The alarm was first rung after listening to what this man had to say ... because normally the ex-prisoners felt a certain reluctance to dwell on the most painful aspects of their life,” Mr Bermejo said. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service