- MADRID, May 11 (Reuters)
- The former head of a Spanish association of Nazi concentration camp victims
said on Wednesday he was never actually a prisoner in any camp and had
lied for almost 30 years about his past.
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- Enric Marco, who published a book entitled "Memories
of Hell" in 1978 about his experiences, confessed he had invented
his account of suffering in Germany's Flossenburg concentration camp.
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- "Why? It was a way of getting as close as possible
to say what I needed to say," Marco told Telecinco television on Wednesday.
"I took on the part of other companions who because of age or other
reasons could not play this role."
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- The 84-year-old flew back at the last minute from the
commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen
camp in Austria after a Spanish historian said Marco's name did not figure
in Flossenburg's archives.
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- He promptly resigned as the head of Spain's Amical de
Mauthausen association.
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- Marco's confession provoked outcry from concentration
camp victims.
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- "There are people around the world, revisionists,
who could take advantage of these facts," Rosa Toran, the new president
of the Mauthausen association, told Telecinco.
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- Marco confessed in a statement he had invented his story
of fleeing Spain as a leftist exile in the wake of the country's bloody
1936-1939 civil war. Nor did he join the French resistance during World
War Two, as he had claimed.
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- Instead, he left Spain for Germany as a migrant worker
in 1941 and was deported by the German government two years later.
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- "I was detained by the Germans, by the Gestapo.
I was in a prison, tried by a war court. All this is true," he said.
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