GERMANY: Germans have reacted with anger and disappointment to Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass's admission that he was a teenage member of the Waffen-SS.
Grass (79) said his 60-year secret "had to come out", four decades after establishing himself as Germany's leading pacifist and moral authority with his 1959 allegorical anti-war classic The Tin Drum.
"In hindsight, I always saw it as a stain that depressed me that I couldn't talk about," said Mr Grass to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "I signed up voluntarily . . . and the Waffen-SS took whatever they could get in those last months of 1944-45. For me it was about getting out of a stifling family situation."
Grass was called up into the 10th SS tank division "Frundsberg" in 1944 that capitulated to the Soviet army in February 1945.
He said that he didn't feel any guilt immediately after the war for his service, but that in later years he was "weighed down by feelings of guilt and disgrace".
The Waffen-SS was an elite soldier division separate from the Wehrmacht and came under the direct leadership of Heinrich Himmler. What began as a group of 200 men charged with guarding Adolf Hitler grew into a criminal organisation with 900,000 members that deported European Jews to death camps and suppressed the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
Michael Jüngs, who has written a biography of Grass, said he was "extremely disappointed" with the admission, which, he said, marked the end of Grass's role as Germany's "moral authority".
Grass, whose autobiography, Peeling the Onion, appears next month, is a familiar face at Social Democrat (SPD) party rallies and at anti-war demonstrations, most recently at events opposing the 2003 Iraq war.
"The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open," he once famously remarked.
"For anyone familiar with the postwar rhetoric of excuses and accusations, it's like not hearing right," wrote Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor Frank Schirrmacher of his Grass coup. "The author . . . who made his life's work breaking the silence and denial in the old West Germany now admits his own silence."
Hitler biographer Joachim Fest said it was inconceivable how Grass "played the conscience of the nation for 60 years - in particular on Nazi questions - and then admits he was entangled himself".
Already several prominent prize commissions have announced they are considering revoking their awards to Grass.
