Herman and Roma Rosenblat are pictured in their North Miami Beach, Fla. home in September. Both had claimed to have met while Herman was held in a concentration camp. (J. Pat Carter/ Associated Press)

A purported Holocaust memoir has been exposed as a fraud, prompting Berkley Books to cancel publication plans for the love story involving a concentration camp prisoner and the woman who became his wife.

Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, has dropped Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence, which was slated to be published in February.

'I wanted to bring happiness to people.... My motivation was to make good in this world.'—Herman Rosenblat

"Berkley Books is cancelling publication of Angel at the Fence after receiving new information from Herman Rosenblat's agent, Andrea Hurst," the publisher said in a release.

The company has also asked Rosenblat to return the money it gave him for his book.

Rosenblat and his wife admitted the book's story of their romance was made up.

"I wanted to bring happiness to people," Rosenblat said Sunday. "I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world."

That may have been his intention, but the result has been a lot of wounded people, including his literary agent.

"Herman Rosenblat and his wife are the most gentle, loving, beautiful people," Hurst said. "I question why I never questioned it. I believed it.

"It was an incredible, hope-filled story."

A work of memory

This marks a major about-face for the publisher, which had defended the book to critics, saying it was a work of memory and only the author knew the whole truth.

The Rosenblats' story was also the subject of a children's book, Angel Girl by Laurie Friedman, published earlier this year.

Several detractors say Rosenblat could never have met his wife the way he described.

According to the story told by Miami-based Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicky, he was a prisoner at a sub-camp of Buchenwald in Nazi Germany and she was a young Jewish girl whose family was pretending to be Christian and lived nearby.

The lovebirds would meet on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence, where she would slip him apples and bread. Rosenblat claimed he was then transferred to another camp and the two lost touch until the 1950s, when they were reunited by accident, on a blind date, in New York.

The couple celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary earlier this year.

'Single greatest love story'

Rosenblat appeared on Oprah Winfrey's talk show twice to recount his tale, with the host calling it "the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air."

But scholars had doubted the story, noting the layout of the sub-camp made such an encounter at the fence virtually impossible because the couple would have met right next to an SS barracks.

A New Republic article recently quoted friends and family members who were outraged by Rosenblat. One of his brothers stopped speaking to him.

Rosenblat's story also upset other Holocaust survivors, according to Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Lipstadt said the survivors didn't believe the tale either.

"How sad that he felt he had to embellish a life of surviving the Holocaust and of being married for half a century," said Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, who himself was duped.

Berenbaum had said the general outline of the Rosenblat romance was likely true but now he says he was "burned."

"In my research, I rely upon the survivors to present the specifics of their existence with integrity. When they don't, they destroy so much and they ruin so much."

The situation echoes that of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, which chronicled Frey's descent into drug addiction. Frey's novel was an official Oprah's Book Club pick.

Eventually, Frey had to apologize publicly on Winfrey's show for some parts of his memoir, which were fabricated or exaggerated.

Penguin has already had to break ties with another memoirist this year.

In March, the publisher pulled Margaret B. Jones's Love and Consequences after she admitted inventing her story of befriending gang members in south-central Los Angeles.

With files from the Associated Press