Gunter Grass Reveals His SS Past

I know that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of former Nazis still roaming the earth — but I never thought that their ranks would include a Nobel laureate and anti-war icon. So this certainly came as a suprise:

Gunter Grass, Germany’s greatest living author and doyen of the left, has confessed that he was a teenage member of Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS.

The Nobel laureate, who has been Germany’s moral guide for decades, admitted in an interview that he became a member of the infamous Nazi corps at 17.

The 78-year-old said he was driven by guilt to reveal the details of his “shameful” past in his autobiography, While Peeling the Onion to be published next month.

“It was weighing on my mind. My silence over all these years is one of the reasons why I decided to write this book. I forced myself to do it,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Asked why he was breaking his silence after more than 60 years, Grass said: “It had to come out finally.” He added: “It will stain me forever.”

The SS, whose hand-picked members were condemned as criminals at the Nuremberg trials, in particular for their active participation in the Holocaust, was the dominant force within the Nazi Party.

Its members initially volunteered, but after 1944, as Germany’s military strength was weakening, members were drafted from the male population. Grass, who had volunteered for the submarine forces at the age of 15 to “get away from the family” but had been rejected, was recruited into the SS in the winter of 1944-45.

Not suprisingly, Grass’s belated confession has led many to question his motives — and his accomplishments:

The head of Germany’s main Jewish organization on Tuesday joined the chorus of criticism whipped up by the belated admission of the Nobel prizewinning novelist Gunter Grass that he served in the Waffen SS during World War II.

Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews, said Grass’ admission negated the novelist’s long-time criticisms of Germany’s inability to come to terms with its Nazi past.

“His long years of silence over his own SS past reduce his earlier statements to absurdities,” Knobloch was quoted as saying by the Netzeitung online newspaper.

[snip]

“It is a disappointment, in a way he has betrayed the whole generation,” said his biographer, Michael Jurgs, who said Grass had never spoken of it during their many conversations.

“We adored him not only as a moral icon, but as a figure who was telling the truth even when the truth hurts,” Jurgs said.

Despite its grim connotations, nobody is suggesting that Grass’ service in the Waffen SS means he was involved in Nazi war crimes.

Although the SS was in charge of administering the Holocaust, the Waffen SS was a military arm.

Some see Grass’ revelations as blatantly self-serving. Hellmuth Karasek, the prominent literary critic and author, speculated that if Grass had revealed his service in the Waffen SS a decade ago, he would have been denied the Nobel prize.

“It was a kind of cowardice and opportunism of conscious,” Karasek said.

Indeed, Lech Walesa — himself a Nobel laureate — has demanded that Grass return his honorary citizenship in Gdansk. (Grass was born in Danzig, which is now Gdansk.)

I consider The Tin Drum to be perhaps the most overrated novel of the 20th century, but I don’t think Grass’s belated confession vitiates the critical role he has played in forcing Germany to live up to its Nazi past. And although I’m disappointed to find out that he was a member of the SS, one of the most bloodthirsty Nazi organizations, I find all the attention being paid to whether he was involved in SS atrocities more than a little curious. He says he was not, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to the contrary. But even if he was, would that undermine his accomplishments? Wouldn’t it simply make his conversion to pacifism and tireless work on behalf of the anti-war movement — the genuineness of which no one seems to be questioning — all that much more inspiring?

Readers?