DON'T KNOW IF this makes me angry or sad. Sad for this poor soul and angry for the real victims of the Nazi horrors:

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.

Yesterday, 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.

What he says is that with his lies he was trying to raise awareness of the Nazi atrocities, but the history professor who uncovered him thinks it might have an opposite effect:

"The danger exists that people who deny the reality of the Nazi camps... might exploit this and tell us that no testimony about the Holocaust has any value," he said.

It's important to point out that the guy didn't claim he was in the concentration camp as a Jew (he isn't) but as a leftwing fighter for the Spanish republic who lost against Franco (precisely the kind of guy Zapatero paid tribute to in Mauthausen earlier this week). What's infuriating (so now I know I'm more angry than said) is that the guy had used his "firsthand experience" in the Nazi horrors to liken Mauthausen to Guantanamo to the applause of all anti-war guys ("hey, unlike Bush he knows what he's talking about"); and, above all, because he's giving fodder to pro-Nazi revisionists all over the world.

Shame on him.