César Orquín Serra was a Valencian anarchist of uncertain origins who fought with the Republican army in the Spanish Civil War, went into exile in France and was deported to the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp on December 12, 1940. For ...See moreCésar Orquín Serra was a Valencian anarchist of uncertain origins who fought with the Republican army in the Spanish Civil War, went into exile in France and was deported to the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp on December 12, 1940. For four years, between June 1941 and May 1945, he led an external work Kommando in three subcamps in Upper Austria, dependent on Mauthausen-Gusen. Under his orders he had more than 400 Spanish republicans. Among the survivors, some praised his work, but others, mostly PCE militants, accused him of mistreating his men, of returning the weakest to die in the mother camp of Mauthausen and, at the end of the deportation, of sending a hundred of communists to the deadly Gusen camp to be exterminated. After the liberation, on May 5, 1945, little else was known, although there were those who claimed that he fled with some of his Nazi friends to Argentina, thus cultivating a black legend that reaches our days, that of one of the most terrible kapos of the entire German concentration system. 75 years later, a Valencian researcher, Guillem Llin Llopis, decided to dive into the archives to separate the myth from reality, bringing to light a story as fabulous as it was unsuspected, which will forever change the memory of the Republican deportation to Mauthausen.
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