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.
I couldn't help it.
And I can't help laughing!
I found "Tin Drum" boring.
I believe you. If you get the chance, can you post some of his stories? If he doesn't want them posted publicly send them Freepmail, and I will not share them and I will delete them after I read them.
I actually saw the movie they made of the Tin Drum. Very disturbing. All I remember is that it was about a boy who suffered some sort of brain damage that prevented him from growing after he fell down some cellar stairs. He would beat on a tin drum and utter an era-splitting scream.
Needed some PR because his career is beginning (!) to Flounder.
Yep, and we're the mower.
Big difference between being put into the SS in 1945 and volunteering for it in 1935.
I remember a scene in a movie about the same time. perhaps it was the Tin Drum, where some soldiers are looking for a man and they only find a woman with very wide skirts sitting in a field. After they go away she stands up and a small man appears from under her skirts buttoning his fly.
All the more reason he got the Nobel if you ask me. The anti Jewish world is getting bigger and bigger and no one seems to care.
He hates Jews. Plain and simple. Now he's getting close to death and figures the first person on the other side he meets just might be one.
Perferct for the Nobel. Ask the Mayan. It helps to be a socialist. And he didn't want the west to link up with the commie east? I doubt it. This guy is just one big lie. And he's coming out with an autobiography? Ha, no-one will believe a word of it.
yitbos
Finally the truth comes out. This lying, filthy Nazi has not changed one bit. He should be tried and executed.
Sorry, but the Waffen SS was an elite unit, which fought mostly at the front. In Grass´ case, his bataillon was not involved in atrocities against civilians. And when he was drafted, he was 15. And you speak of "his war crimes"??
There is a difference between Waffen-SS and SS. The Waffen-SS was designed to take part in the military war, while the SS only "fought" civilians.
President Reagan once visited a German war cemetery in Bitburg where the bones of drafted Waffen-SS soldiers lie, despite of the controversy, he decided to do that.
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