A SPANISH octogenerian who for years headed an association of former Nazi concentration camp inmates admitted yesterday that he had lied about being in a camp, but said he had posed as a survivor to make people take notice of the issue.

“Without my mantle of a survivor people would never have listened to me,” said Enric Marco, who last week was dismissed as chairman of an umbrella association of Nazi camp survivors. He had admitted lying about being in Flossenburg and said he had never set foot in any camp. Señor Marco, 84, had chaired the group up until the eve of this week’s 60th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen in Austria.

It was that commemoration that caused his downfall. An historian researching the anniversary looked into events at Flossenburg — and failed to find any trace of Señor Marco having been there.

Señor Marco was ordered to return home from Austria. “I knew what to expect,” he said. Only then did he tell the truth to his wife and two daughters, also ignorant of his real past. “I admit I never was interned in the Flossenburg camp, though I was in preventive detention accused of plotting against the Third Reich,” Señor Marco admitted. He had been freed after several weeks of maltreatment and sent back to Spain in 1943.

Now the man who wrote an autobiography, Memory of Hell, in 1978 about his life that never was, and gave talks to schoolchildren, admits that Holocaust deniers “will make hay with this and it’s a shame”.

After Señor Marco’s initial account of camp life, the Catalán government awarded him the Cross of Saint Jordi, the region’s top civilian distinction.

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