Profile/Günter Grass: Since the second World War he has been Germany's conscience, but only now, in his late 70s, has Günter Grass decided to face up to his own Nazi past, writes Derek Scally in Berlin
In May 1945, an 18-year-old German prisoner of war with the number 31G6078785 signed a confession stating that he was a member of the Waffen-SS.
After giving his fingerprints and receiving a typhoid vaccine, the prisoner was interned and released nearly a year later. His file vanished into a US military filing cabinet.
Some 60 years, 30 books and one Nobel Prize in Literature later, prisoner 31G6078785, now Günter Grass - Germany's moral compass for the last 40 years - confessed a second time to membership of the Waffen-SS.
"For decades I refused to acknowledge the word and the double letters. What I did with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to keep a secret after the war because of increasing shame. But the burden remained and no one could ease it," he writes in his new autobiography, Peeling the Onion. "Assertions of ignorance could not conceal being part of a system that planned, organised and carried out the annihilation of millions of people. Even when excused of active guilt, there remained the worn-down remains of what is all too often called co-responsibility. Living with that for the remaining years is a certainty."
For Germans, to suggest that Günter Grass, author of the anti-war classic The Tin Drum, was in the SS is like suggesting the Pope is neither Catholic nor German.
The idea that the teenage Grass, a handsome youth with dark hair and knowing eyes, wore a tin helmet and a uniform bearing the dreaded SS runes was so inconceivable, even for Grass's many critics, that no one went looking for proof.
Even when Grass spoke over the years about his "shame" for his teenage wartime activities, he never contradicted the assumption he was, like Pope Benedict, a member of the Flakhelfer generation, too young to be caught up in the Nazi regime.
In hindsight the clues were there but, for six decades, Günter Grass hid his past in full view.
Grass was born on October 16th, 1927 in Danzig, today Gdansk, the son of a Protestant grocer father and a Catholic mother of Kashubian-Polish origin. After war broke out, the teenage Grass joined the Reichsarbeitsdienst, an auxiliary service that supported the Wehrmacht and carried out civic and construction projects.
Aged 15 he volunteered for the submarine forces, to escape a stifling family environement, but was rejected and was drafted instead into the Waffen-SS in 1944.
By that stage in the war, the SS he joined was a long way from the elite brigade created in the 1920s to provide bodyguards for Adolf Hitler. German historians draw a clear distinction between the early volunteers from the 1930s, directly involved in the Holocaust and running concentration camps, and the convicts and teenagers drafted into the Waffen-SS from 1944 onwards.
"In our public perception we have helped create categorical shorthand in which we reduce historical experience to a victim-perpetrator dichotomy," according to Prof Bernd Wagner, author of Hitler's Political Soldiers, the standard work on the Waffen-SS. He is just one of several historians surprised at the media hullabaloo. He says that, with the passing years and growing stature, Grass had every reason to fear being written off overnight if the truth came out.
"The term Waffen-SS sufficed to stigmatise . . . and is always associated by reflex with Auschwitz and genocide," says Prof Wagner.
Grass has admitted over the years that, even as the country stood in ruins in 1945, he remained a true believer in the Third Reich, the Führer and the Endsieg (German for "final victory").
"I wasn't seduced, I let myself be seduced," he has said.
But only now, in his autobiography, does he tell the full story of his desperate war experiences: wetting his pants before his first encounter with the Soviet army; smearing his face with warm oil to feign jaundice; seeing young comrades hanging from trees wearing "deserter" signs; wandering behind enemy lines and narrowly escaping Soviet fire.
AFTER THE WAR, Grass trained to become a stonemason and later studied art and design in Düsseldorf and Berlin, all the while writing poetry and drama on the side. He rocketed to fame in 1959 with The Tin Drum, the picaresque parable of Oskar Matzerat, who refuses to grow up among the chaos of corrupt politicians and brown-shirted grocers as Danzig teeters on the brink of war.
Several bestselling works followed, and he became Germany's leading left-wing intellectual.
He backed Willy Brandt's Social Democrats in the 1970s, attacked successive Christian Democrat leaders and, in 1989, favoured a two-state federation instead of German unification.
He has protested against every war from Vietnam to Iraq and has led his own, long-running private war against the conservative Springer newspaper group. It's no surprise, then, that it is right-wingers who are now lining up to beat him and are even prepared to accept the irony of using a stick Grass himself provided.
The Hitler biographer Joachim Fest summed up the right-wing view that it was "inconceivable how Grass, who played the conscience of the nation for 60 years - in particular on Nazi questions - admits he was himself entangled". There is a certain hypocrisy, critics point out, in concealing one's own Nazi past while judging other leading public figures for attempting to do the same.
Grass passed up many opportunities to come clean, such as when Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan made a controversial visit to the soldier cemetery in Bitburg where members of the Waffen-SS lay buried among other soldiers. Grass protested vigorously against what he called the "cluttering of history" rather than admit that, had circumstances been different, he could have been one of the soldiers buried there.
The criticism continued to gather steam all this week: one newspaper suggested that Grass's belated revelation was motivated by the fear that documents revealing his past would have been released later this year, while a leader of Germany's Jewish community suggested it was a PR stunt to boost sales of his autobiography. Grass's publishers brought forward the book's release by two weeks to last Thursday, and the first print run of 150,000 copies is already sold out.
In a television interview on Thursday night Grass went on the offensive against his critics, saying he had spent three years working on the book and was not motivated by fear of exposure or PR concerns.
"You can say too late but it was only now that I was in a position to do this," he said.
Many leading public figures in Germany and Poland have come to the author's defence. His admission may be late, they say, but his merciless self-examination in Peeling the Onion (one critic called it "Grass peeling himself") validates the moral relevance - perhaps even the existence - of his life's work.
"I perceived this as a stain and have tried for 60 years to draw the consequences from it," he said. "This correlates to my later conduct as author and citizen." Once again, Günter Grass has divided Germany and stopped cold the country's post-World Cup reverie, the brief honeymoon from its history.
When he was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999 for "sketching the forgotten face of history", Grass's acceptance speech was prescient.
He said: "Every time the end of the post-war period is announced in Germany, history overtakes us once again."
The Günter Grass File
Who is he? Günter Grass, author, sculptor, painter, pipe smoker and Nobel Prize winner
Why is he in the news? For admitting he was a teenage member of the Waffen-SS
Most appealing characteristic Untiring outrage at injustice
Least appealing characteristic Like all German intellectuals, taking himself too seriously
Most likely to say "I am deeply ashamed I joined the Waffen-SS"
Least likely to say "Jawohl, mein Führer"