This is the lie. But what of the truth? What really happened during the period Marco spent in Germany in the early 1940s? Is it possible to reconstruct the most controversial section of his biography? The answer is yes: for the most part.
Marco set off for his new life as an emigrant on November 27, 1941, from Estación del Norte in Barcelona, with the first convoy of Catalan volunteer workers leaving for Germany. The train was crowded with men, some of them adults, most of them young men, though few as young as Marco, who had barely turned twenty; each had an envelope with his name, his number, his train ticket, his seat reservation and a food coupon, in addition to a hunk of bread, some tinned food and a change of winter clothes; each wore an armband bearing the Spanish flag, and carried his personal passport and a sheet of instructions he was to observe during the journey. It lasted several days. At various stations, the train would stop; here they were given coffee and a roll, and they were allowed to get out and stretch their legs and visit the toilets, but not leave the station, and when they arrived in Metz, in northwest France, they were assigned to different trains headed for different destinations, and the French police who had escorted the convoy since it crossed the Spanish border were replaced by the German police (or this is what Marco remembers). Many years later, shooting a scene for Santi Fillol and Lucas Vermal’s film Ich bin Enric Marco at this same station, Marco would wonder aloud, with the pensive and melodramatic air of someone seeking out his distant past but unable to find it, as though so many years later he could not understand why he had left Spain as a volunteer worker: “I would like to know where I was heading. And what I was hoping to achieve.” In fact, the answers to these two questions are no mystery, and Marco knew them better than anyone: he was heading for Kiel, in northeast Germany, having been hired by a German company as part of a Spanish-German accord enabling Franco to repay his debt to Hitler for aid during the Civil War and to help him win the world war and impose fascism throughout Europe; he was hoping to avoid military service and to earn a much better living than he could have in Spain at the time. It is that simple. It is that easy.
Marco arrived in Kiel in early December. Like the rest of the Spanish workers, he was not billeted in Kiel itself, but in an encampment of wooden barracks some twenty-five kilometres away in Wattenbek, in the district of Bordesholm. Here he lived for three months, travelling into Kiel every day and returning every night. The city had been one of the principal German naval bases since the mid-nineteenth century, and the Deutsche Werke Werft, the company that employed Marco, had specialised in building merchant ships until the Nazis came to power and they began to specialise in building warships, submarines and various other military vessels. Marco worked on the docks as a mechanic, specifically in a unit dedicated to repairing and servicing the engines of torpedo boats; his job mostly involved checking the engines (dismantling cylinder heads, grinding valves, replacing piston rings), but also in manufacturing precision parts for the propeller shafts of torpedo boats. This was a rather specialised task, and one to which he was assigned because he was a conscientious and diligent worker. Not all of his co-workers were so diligent, in fact most of his co-workers were not, at least according to Marco, who considered himself better than they were, or who thought that, compared to him, they were plebs, a crowd of idle, illiterate, alcoholic morons. Marco prided himself, not only on being better than they, but on working in a section predominantly staffed by free Germans together with a number of French and Belgians, some of whom were prisoners of war. Marco claims that he organised a resistance cell with them, but there is not the slightest evidence that this is true. He also claims that he personally engaged in acts of sabotage, something that, according to him, he could do without running any risks, by failing to clean the rag he used to grind the valve and the valve seat of the three 20-cylinder Mercedes-Benz engines that powered each torpedo boat; but there is no proof that this is true either. There is, however, evidence, incontrovertible evidence, that Marco was arrested by the German police, that he spent several months in prison and that he was brought to trial.
All of these facts are contained in the charges against Marco brought by the Hanseatic High Tribunal in Hamburg. In it, we can read that our man was arrested on March 2, 1942, scarcely three months after arriving in Germany, and taken to the Gestapo gaol on Blumenstrasse in Kiel. For Marco himself, however, it all began several days before his arrest, when he was alerted by one of his colleagues. His name was Bruno Shankowitz, a German, and Marco had become friendly with him and his wife, Kathy, who had invited him to spend Christmas with them (Marco, ever the ladies’ man, insinuated that he had, or could have had, an affair with Kathy, or that Kathy was infatuated with him; he also claims that he had several other affairs while in Kiel). One morning, while he was working, Bruno asked him whether he was a communist; surprised, Marco said no and inquired why he had asked. Because there’s a rumour going around that you’re a communist, said Bruno; then he advised him: Be careful what you say and who you say it to. It was sound advice, but Marco barely had time to follow it. Hours or days later he was arrested at his barracks in Wattenbek. According to the judicial record, Marco was held for five days before being remanded in custody; according to Marco, these five days were spent in a crowded cell with many other prisoners like him (among them a Brazilian sailor named Lacerda or Lacerta or Lacerte da Silva), sleeping on straw strewn over hard concrete and being repeatedly interrogated. Marco says (and I think we have to believe him) that this was the most difficult point of his life, that he was panicked, that he was mistreated, that he did not know what would become of him, and that he remembers being permanently sodden: with water, with urine, with vomit; but he also says other things that I do not think we have to believe, or that we do not have to believe wholeheartedly, like the fact that he faced up to his interrogators and that he presented himself to them as a freedom fighter.
According to the record, Marco was transferred to Kiel gaol on March 11, where he was held pending his trial until October of that year. We know nothing of what happened during those six months other than the account Marco began to give after his imposture was discovered, almost always with the intention of proving that all the lies he had told about his internment in Flossenbürg were a legitimate, educational and well-intentioned displacement, albeit a little embroidered, of the punishments he had suffered in Kiel prison, and not the bastard child of a ménage à trois between his need to be a protagonist, his imagination and his reading. Nevertheless, in a long letter to the editor of the Diari de Sant Cugat in January 2006, in response to a letter from a certain señora Ballester, published in the same newspaper, Marco offered some concrete details about his imprisonment which, though slathered in the usual pottage of heroism, victimhood and self-justification, occasionally have a distinct flavour of truth.
“Shaved, disinfected, daubed with some caustic, foul-smelling ointment,” Marco writes in a Catalan full of rhetorical flourishes which I have taken the liberty of correcting or tempering in this translation, “I was confined to a cell on the second floor [of Kiel gaol], the last cell on the left, next to the drain where urine and excrement were emptied and where we filled our water jugs. In the cell there was no running water, no toilet and no flush mechanism, only a small stone washbasin against the wall that was barely large enough to fit my cupped hands when I washed my face, and which, on tiptoe, I could just reach to wash my arse. A bucket with no lid in which to shit and piss, and a handful of newspaper clippings to wipe myself, for which I will always be grateful, less for their hygienic purpose than because the pictures kept me connected to the outside world. A bed that was barely fifty centimetres wide, screwed to the wall by two hinges, with two folding legs so that it could be raised by a chain and stowed against the wall. It was important to save space in order to use the work bench. It was strictly forbidden to keep the bed lowered during the day. A straw mattress scarcely the thickness of two fingers. The remainder of the furnishings consisted of a box containing an aluminium plate and spoon, a comb—I never understood the purpose of this—and a bilingual book of prayers and psalms, in German set in gothic type, and in Latin, which, fortunately, I could understand. A large card bearing my name, misspelled as always—they assumed Marco was a first name rather than a surname—and significant details: ‘Solitary confinement, indefinite sentence.’ […] Days of backbreaking work from morning to night, from Monday to midday on Sunday, with no possibility of being excused or exempted. Every morning, after coffee, the Wachtmeister brought me a box of metal objects from the foundry that I was to smooth using files and other tools given to us with the day’s work. Metres upon metres of thick hemp rope that had to be separated into fibres. The dust from the hemp parched the nose and throat and irritated the eyes, but the most difficult thing was stripping electrical wiring with your bare hands to collect the copper from the cables the Germans ripped from the cities they conquered. Nine months in these conditions, Señora Ballester,” Marco concludes, “nine months locked up in that cell.”
It was not nine months, but seven, but that hardly matters now. Here and there, in this version and various other accounts and statements made after the scandal broke, our man gave many other details, real and fictitious, about his incarceration. Details about the revolting food he was given, about the beatings he received, about his repeated detention in punishment cells, about the despair that often threatened to overwhelm him and the remedies he used to combat it: with his infallible nose for melodrama, Marco told Pons Prades—as I have already recounted—that, listening in his cell to the cries of the gulls and the voices of the warders’ children playing in the courtyard outside, he said to himself: “While there are gulls gliding over the sea and children playing, all is not lost”; on the other hand, there is a story that Marco did not tell Pons Prades, one that surpasses this in its sentimentality; one that, though often repeated and alluded to in Bassa’s biography, I have not yet recounted. According to Marco, while in prison he was allowed to write letters from time to time, letters that he wrote but which never reached their destination because they were kept by the authorities; he was compelled to write letters in German, but his German was so rudimentary and his gaolers gave him so little time to write, that he was forced to devise a system if he was to say everything he had to say: the system involved pricking his finger with a needle, mixing the blood with saliva, and using the resulting mixture as ink and the needle as a pen to write drafts of his letters in the margins of the newspaper articles he used as toilet paper; in this way, when the time came, when he was finally given paper and pen and a few scant minutes in which to write, he had only to make a clean copy of these bloodstained drafts.
Knowing Marco (and even without knowing him), this harrowing story is difficult to credit; what is true is that, like most of Marco’s lies, it contains a sliver of truth: it is true that our man wrote at least one letter while in prison, and it is true that he wrote it in German, just as it is true that it never reached its destination because Marco’s gaolers never sent it. I know this because the letter was found in the Schleswig-Holstein state archives and I am holding it in my hands. It is addressed to his wife—who had been informed by Spanish authorities that her husband was in prison—and is dated Kiel Prison, September 1, 1942, by which time Marco has already spent six months in custody and knows the serious charges levelled against him; the writer’s German grammar is flawed, and his handwriting often illegible. Below, I have transcribed the letter in its entirety, chiefly because the intended reader is less its notional recipient than the writer’s very real censors and well expresses Marco’s desperate desire to ingratiate himself with them (Marco lies, flatters the Germans and even gives his own name and those of his relatives in German, or in his made-up German), in a display of obsequiousness that may partly explain the outcome of his trial. The translation, by Carlos Pérez Ricart, attempts to preserve the limitations of Marco’s pidgin German:
My darling [name illegible, probably “Anni,” meaning Anita],
I send kisses from far away with the hope of my happy return to your side. I know that you do not understand one word of German, I understand little. But, writing in other language is not permitted and next week, Wednesday exactly, my trial begins after seven months of investigation where I defended myself against accusation of communist and other lies said against me. My lawyer told me already I will be found innocent. There is no guilt in me. They think I was a red volunteer, but it is proved this is a lie.
A man accused me of being communist volunteer and other madness that makes sense. These crazy things have provoked seven months in prison and much silence, because I know not many words of German and people are not kind to me at work hour because they think I am red.
My imprisonment is a test for the Germans…[illegible] But now everything will be resolved because I will leave the gaol, we will get back our money and our little [illegible, a child’s name, probably “Toni,” Anita’s biological and Marco’s adoptive son] will have his father by his side again. We will have tranquillity. I will demand justice from my enemies and the recovery of salary for the seven months spent in prison.
I know very well how much you have suffered but all that is almost over and soon we will be together. In all this time not one day has passed when I did not think about you, nor one moment without kissing my wedding ring. It is all I have left; everything else is kept by the prison. But you know how much love I have. I have resisted seven months in prison for you.
I have been thinking that it would be good for you to come here. [Child’s name, illegible, probably “Toni” again] could come here too and love the German land more than our own country. Perhaps here there is not the blue sky and the dazzling sun of our country, but the men here have these things [the blue sky and the dazzling sun] in their soul. Yes, we could come and live here because we are like the Germans: careful and with open hearts. Here I have learned to love them.
In fact, this is something I thought about before and this is why I started looking for a house. I wanted to surprise you with the news, but this trial has ruined everything. Now is the time to resume those plans. I earn enough money in my job and in only a few months after my release you could come to the city.
I hope that all our relatives are well. Give my regards to aunt Kathe and uncles Richard and Francisco.
My darling, I send all my love to you and to our son.
Your Heinrich
(I do not write more because my German is still bad)
Judging by what he told his wife, Marco was optimistic about the outcome of his trial; but perhaps he simply wanted to seem so, or wanted the Germans to believe he was: the truth is that, several days before the court hearing, when he must have known the charges against him, he had no real reason to be optimistic. In the charges filed by the prosecutor, a certain Doktor Stegemann, on July 18, 1942, Marco is accused of a grave crime: “Systematically planning actions—of high treason—with intent to change the constitution of the Reich by force” (in German: das hochverrätische Unternehmen, mit Gewalt die Verfassung des Reichs zu ändern vorbereitet zu haben). Specifically, the prosecutor claimed that Marco was a communist and had been a volunteer in the Republican army during the Civil War, and accused him of disseminating propaganda among the Spanish workers. There is no need to pay much heed to the accusation that Marco was a communist; in such matters, the German authorities used the term broadly, making no distinction between communists and anarchists: as far as they were concerned, both were Rotspanier—Spanish Reds. As to the charge of disseminating propaganda, the prosecutor based this on the testimony of Jaime Poch-Torres and José Robledo Canales, two of Marco’s Spanish co-workers who had heard him boast about having fought against Franco, criticising Hitler and the Nazi party, and predicting that the Russians would defeat the Germans and revelling at this thought, since—according to what Marco said, or what Poch-Torres and Robledo Canales said that Marco said—he would be able to go back to his country “and fight for inevitable, indispensible communism in Spain.” It is true that none of this seems to be of great import, certainly it was no more than a number of injudicious remarks made in the presence of the wrong people; but there can be no doubt that the crime of high treason—or “promoting the ideals of International Communism and thereby imperilling Germany,” to use the phrase in the prosecutor’s report—was very serious, all the more so in Nazi Germany, and especially in Nazi Germany in the fourth year of the war. So serious that the most lenient sentence Marco could expect was to be sent to a concentration camp.
But the fact is that he was acquitted. How do we explain this verdict? I don’t know. In his ruling, the presiding magistrate explained it by stating that Marco was not dangerous and based his ruling on the retractions of Poch-Torres and Robledo Canales, who insisted that Marco had not attempted to convert them to communism (he was, they said, simply a young man trying to impress them), and on the testimony of Marco’s immediate boss, who exonerated him of any acts of sabotage and praised him as an excellent worker. The problem is working out how the magistrate came to a finding so favourable to Marco, and so at odds with the unequivocal initial view of the prosecutor, and indeed an order from the RSHA—the Reich Main Security Office—issued two years earlier on September 25, 1940, which determined that communist veterans of the Spanish Civil War were to be sent to concentration camps (though it is true that this order was issued before the signing of the Hispano-German Agreement that had brought Marco to Germany, and that it referred to prisoners of war; it is also true that the order was rescinded shortly afterwards, in 1943, so that Spanish communists could be used as manpower in the war effort); let me put it another way: it goes without saying that Marco was not a dangerous man, but countless utterly innocuous men were condemned by the Nazi courts while Marco was not. Why did his Spanish accusers recant? Why did the prosecutor himself recant, why did he ultimately withdraw the charges? I don’t know. In his letter to his wife, Marco mentions his defence lawyer, a midshipman whom Marco freely admits did not understand a word of Spanish, so communication between them was not easy. Nor can it have been easy for Marco, with his faltering German, to write a statement to the prosecutor rebutting the charges against him, still less to defend himself before the magistrate when, one September morning, he was transported from Kiel to Hamburg for the hearing. These linguistic difficulties must have made the proceedings somewhat confusing. More so than was already the case. That said, let me reiterate that Marco thrived in such circumstances, chaos and confusion were his natural habitat, since this allows me both to highlight one of Marco’s essential traits and to offer a theory about his curious acquittal: Marco, as I have said before, is essentially a conman, a shameless charlatan, a peerless trickster, so it is impossible to dismiss the idea that, just as he managed to dupe the French military authorities, convincing them that his past was blameless or inoffensive and that he was an inoffensive, not to say irreproachable, young man, he similarly duped the Nazi judicial authorities, managing to persuade the German magistrate that he did not represent the slightest threat to National Socialism and as such deserved to be released. Whatever the case, on October 7, 1942, the President of the District Court of the Hanseatic High Tribunal signed a ruling rescinding Marco’s incarceration.
Our man remained in Germany for several months after this, but these are merely the epilogue to this crucial chapter in his biography. In the ruling that brought an end to his trial, Marco was ordered to “make himself available to the police for supplemental inquiries” while a note in the margin ordered that a copy of the ruling be sent to the “directorate of the Secret State Police [Geheime Staatspolizei, the actual name of the Gestapo] in Kiel.” This order is open to a variety of interpretations, but Marco says that, although in theory he was set free, in practice he was still a prisoner, and for several weeks or perhaps months he was incarcerated, not in the prison in Kiel, but back in the Gestapo barracks on Blumenstrasse, from where he remembers two officers escorting him every morning to Kiel University library, where he spent hours classifying Spanish books and magazines. Marco also says that he clearly remembers that one afternoon, without warning, he was driven to the lobby of the barracks and left standing, with no explanation, with a duty officer who did not even seem to notice him. And he says that, after he had been there for some time, waiting for he knew not what or whom, he suddenly noticed a number of familiar objects on the officer’s desk—a passport photograph, his expired permit as a Spanish volunteer worker, a few other things—but he said nothing and carried on waiting. And he says that at some point, by which time he had been waiting several hours, the duty officer finally seemed to register his presence, looked from him to the objects on the desk and back at him, then without looking at his belongings he swept them to the floor and bellowed “Raus!”
He says he hurriedly gathered up his belongings and raced out of the barracks. He says that it was dark, that it was raining, that he suddenly found himself alone, with no money and nowhere to go. He says he searched for somewhere to shelter and was unfortunate enough to find it in a park that turned out not to be a park, but a cemetery. He says that he does not remember where he slept that night, though he’s almost certain it was out of doors, on the other hand he does remember going to seek help the following day at the only place where he knew anyone, the dockyards of the Deutsche Werke Werft, from which he had been evicted and where he was no longer permitted to work, but where he found a German who acted as an interpreter between the Spanish labourers and their German employers, a man, Marco remembers, or says he remembers, who had lived for some time in Argentina and had returned to Germany, lured by the promised prosperity of triumphant Nazism, someone with whom Marco was apparently on good terms, and may have been the same man who, according to the German court records, had acted as interpreter during his trial. Whoever he was, the man took pity on Marco, or so he claims, and managed to find him a job at Hagenuk, a telecommunications company, which meant he was provided with a roof over his head in a camp ground located in the factory. The memories that Marco retains of this period, or what he says he remembers, are scant and unhappy, because although his job was easier than that at the dockyards—here he built electronic components for rockets and aeroplanes—the atmosphere in the factory and in the camp was much more violent, given that, he says, it was full of dirty, brutal and desperate Lithuanians and Ukrainians.
Marco too was desperate, but he was desperate to return to Barcelona. Or so he says. And he says that, one day, the same providential interpreter who had secured him the job in Hagenuk suggested a way for him to return home: after a year spent in Germany, Spanish workers were entitled to return home for a one-month furlough on condition that they then returned to their post; Marco had not yet worked a full year, having spent most of his time in Germany in prison, but the interpreter assured him that he could arrange for Marco to join one of the convoys of workers returning to Spain on leave. Marco says that he accepted without a second thought, without considering what he would do when the time came for him to return to Germany and he failed to do so, without considering what he would do when, after he’d failed to return, the Spanish authorities demanded he complete his deferred military service, and of course without worrying about the fact that, in Spain, Franco was still imposing a reign of terror, without considering anything other than fleeing Germany and returning home, like those animals that can smell an imminent disaster in the air; in the summer of 1943, Marco had already intuited that a few short months later, on December 13, the city of Kiel would be destroyed in a rain of fire unleashed by hundreds of American bombers. Marco arrived in Germany when it looked set to win the war, and left Germany when it was certain to lose it. We do not yet know what sort of life our man led once back in Barcelona, but we know something much more important: at least up until this point, Marco always sided with the majority.