Spanish Nazi camp 'survivor' lied

BBC News:

A leading representative of Holocaust survivors in Spain has admitted to being "an impostor".

Enric Marco told Spanish TV he was never held in the Nazi concentration camp of Flossenburg as he had claimed for nearly 30 years.

Mr Marco, 84, was head of the Amical de Mauthausen group, named after the camp in Austria where the Nazis held most of their Spanish political prisoners.

His lies were discovered by a historian researching his story.

Mr Marco admitted: "I wasn't in a concentration camp. I was held in captivity and the Nazis did impose penalties on me. But that does not exonerate me from being an impostor."

He addressed the Spanish parliament in January, at a moving event marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

"When we arrived in the concentration camps... they stripped us, their dogs bit us, their spotlights dazzled us," he said.

"They put the men on one side and the women and children on the other; the women formed a circle and defended their children with their bodies," he added.

More recently Mr Marco attended a ceremony in the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany.

But on the very day Mr Marco was re-elected president of Amical de Mauthausen, it emerged that he had lied about his past.

Historian Benito Bermejo had noticed inconsistencies in Mr Marco's account while researching Spanish prisoners' experiences in the Nazi death camps.

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