|
Nobel laureate was Nazi elite
12/08/2006 20:41 - (SA)
Berlin - Nobel prize-winning German author Guenter Grass has made the sensational confession that he was drafted into Nazi Germany's notorious Waffen SS elite force in World War II.
The confession has prompted his biographer to lament the "end of a moral authority".
Grass, 78, told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Saturday that he had revealed this detail in his memoir Peeling Onions, to be released in September.
It was common knowledge that the author, best known for his 1959 novel The Tin Drum, had been conscripted into the German air defence forces.
In his autobiography, Grass recalls how he tried to join the Third Reich's submarine forces when he was 15, but was rejected because he was too young.
He said he was drafted into the Waffen SS the following year but denied suggestions he joined willingly.
Grass is a prominent leftist and pacifist. He was wounded in 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
Others non-plussed with confession
"I wanted to make clear once again what happened then and above all things concerning me," he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine. "My silence all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book. It had to come out."
Other German authors are non-plussed with his confession.
Walter Kempowski, 77, said it came "a bit late".
Grass biographer Michael Juergs was "personally disappointed" and lamented "the end of a moral authority".
Grass was born in the Baltic port of Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk. He said he had tried to join the submarine forces to flee his oppressive family but now saw the idea as "crazy".
Grass said he was "not at all repulsed by the Waffen SS" at the time. Only later did he have "feelings of guilt and shame".
Held in same PoW camp as pope
"I was stupid enough to believe Germans would not do such things and took it all for propaganda," until the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, he said.
Grass said he never fired a shot during his time with the feared force, whose notoriety he only grasped once his unit had been defeated, when one of his superiors ordered him to get rid of his uniform.
Grass was held at a PoW camp at Bad Aibling in Bavaria, where Untied States forces also detained Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
The author said in the interview that he had befriended a Joseph, whom he described as "very Catholic", at the camp but did not say whether this was Ratzinger.
Grass campaigned for the Social Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s and joined the party in 1982, resigning in 1993 in protest against restrictions to Germany's asylum laws.
He was awarded the Nobel literature prize in 1999.
- AFP
|
South Africa
