Der Spiegel has been running fabricated stories

German news magazine Der Spiegel has sacked an award-winning staff writer after accusing him of inventing details and quotes in numerous stories.

Claas Relotius "falsified articles on a grand scale and even invented characters", Der Spiegel said.

Among the articles in question are major features that had been nominated for or won awards, the magazine added.

The story "Jaeger's Border" would prove to be Relotius' undoing. It was one fabricated story too many, because this time, he had a co-author, who sounded the alarm while also collecting facts to counter his fiction. That co-author, Juan Moreno, has been traveling the world as a reporter for DER SPIEGEL since 2007. In the dispute with and surrounding Relotius, Moreno risked his own job, at times even desperately seeking to re-report his colleague's claims at his own expense. Moreno would go through three or four weeks of hell because his colleagues and senior editors in Hamburg didn't initially believe that Relotius could be nothing more than a liar.

In late November and into early December, some at DER SPIEGEL even believed that Moreno was the real phony and that Relotius was the victim of slander. Relotius skillfully parried all allegations and all of Moreno's well-researched evidence, constantly coming up with new ways of sowing doubt, plausibly refuting accusations and twisting the truth in his favor. Until, ultimately, his tricks stopped working. Until he could no longer sleep at night for fear that he might get caught. Relotius caved in last week when a superior, Özlem Gezer, deputy head of the "Gesellschaft" section where he worked, confronted him and told him outright that she no longer believed him. On Thursday, he sat down with his section head and the editor-in-chief and came clean -- or at least his version of clean.

It has now become clear that Claas Relotius, 33 years old, one of DER SPIEGEL's best writers, winner of multiple awards and a journalistic idol of his generation, is neither a reporter nor a journalist. Rather, he produces beautifully narrated fiction. Truth and lies are mixed together in his articles and some, at least according to him, were even cleanly reported and free of fabrication. Others, he admits, were embellished with fudged quotes and other made-up facts. Still others were entirely fabricated. During his confession on Thursday, Relotius said, verbatim: "It wasn't about the next big thing. It was the fear of failure." And: "The pressure not to fail grew as I became more successful."