Posted on 08/11/2006 1:25:11 PM PDT by lizol
Nobel prize winner Grass admits serving in Nazi SS
Fri Aug 11, 2006 8:37 PM BST
BERLIN (Reuters) - Nobel prize-winning German author Guenter Grass has admitted for the first time that he served in the Waffen-SS, Adolf Hitler's elite Nazi troops.
In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Grass, 78, said he volunteered for submarine service towards the end of World War Two. He was called up instead to serve in the Waffen-SS in the eastern city of Dresden.
The author, best known for his first novel "The Tin Drum" and an active supporter of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD), said his wartime secret had been weighing on his mind and was one of the reasons he wrote a book of recollections which details his war service. The book is out in September.
"My silence through all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book," the paper quoted Grass as saying in a preview of its Saturday edition. "It had to come out finally."
One of the most powerful organisations in Nazi Germany, the SS played a key role in the Holocaust, establishing and operating the death camps in which millions died.
The Waffen-SS grew into a force of 38 combat divisions with almost one million men and it was condemned as part of a criminal organisation at the post-war Nuremberg trials.
Grass was wounded in 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp and later became a prominent peace activist. He said he had volunteered for army service as a way of breaking away from home and family.
"For me it was primarily about getting out of there. Out of that corner, away from my family," he told the paper.
"I wanted to put an end to that and that's why I volunteered for the army.
"It was like that for many of my generation," he added. "We were doing army service and then suddenly, one year later, the draft order was on the table. And then I realised, probably not until I was in Dresden, that it was the Waffen-SS."
Grass won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He is viewed as part of the artistic movement known in German as "Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung" or "coming to terms with the past".
Grass opposed the reunification of Germany in 1990, arguing that the country would be in danger of reverting to its role as a war-mongerer.
Ping
Does this make Grass's ass grass?
Dresden huh...firebombed to oblivion. I wonder if he ran?
The irony of it all. He was an oppressor of the Jews in WWII, and now's he's a peacenik, which again, oppresses the Jews.
Nothing to see here, move along, don't look at the Nazi SS storm trooper, he loves peace now.
I read Gunter Grass' Tin Drum a bazillion years ago. It took me 4 years to wade through it and, at the end, I wound up wondering why I had expended the effort. I didn't see the point of the novel and wrote it off as a pretty good waste of time and energy on my part.
That doesn't have anything to do with him being a former nazi, but he isn't much of a writer (IMO), either!!
I read Gunter Grass' Tin Drum a bazillion years ago. It took me 4 years to wade through it and, at the end, I wound up wondering why I had expended the effort. I didn't see the point of the novel and wrote it off as a pretty good waste of time and energy on my part.
That doesn't have anything to do with him being a former nazi, but he isn't much of a writer (IMO), either!!
What a damned liar. Are we to believe that most men joined Hitler's army to escape their families?
You actually read it when you could have simply watched the movie? Are you a masochist?
I was reading a description of the Warsaw uprising and what the Nazi's did. The SS were the worst. This man talks peace, but no doubt he is a mass murderer-disgusting.
How do you volunteer for submarine service near the end of WWII - were there any left?
ping
The SS was manned by volunteers...they were the Elite. I don't believe he was drafted into the SS-he chose the SS.
Drafted into the Waffen-SS? I must admit, that's a new one on me. Anyone have a reference to such a thing?
Well, technically, most of the German fleet that could leave the harbor were, or had become, submarines. (They had also become coffins as well.)
Sounds like he's pandering to the rebelliousness of today's youth and college crowd, just like Cher and Madonna.
Cher, Madonna, and Gunther Grass....thats a neat sentence.
Guenter Grass was a screaming anti American all through the Cold War.
Now we find out he was anti American before 1945. From Nazi to Socialist.
No conscience, none.
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