[goldfinch]

Doing some math. If he is 78 now, he was born in 1928. Hitler came to power before he started school...so he was indoctrinated from an early age. He would have been 11 when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. The article said he volunteered near the end of the war and was injured in 1945...he would have been 17 then. So he probably volunteered at age 16. I am inclined to think he was not a big-time Nazi decision maker so I am cannot be too upset with him.

My uncle followed Patton across Europe in a tank. He said he knew they were winning because the Germans they captured kept getting younger and younger. It sounds like Grass was part of that trend.

[Alter Kaker]

I am inclined to think he was not a big-time Nazi decision maker so I am cannot be too upset with him.

Grass was drafted, and was a soldier. The Waffen SS was just an elite military unit, it was not the same as the other SS which ran death camps. A human being could have joined the Waffen SS -- a human being could not have joined the regular SS. Now many Waffen-SS units committed war crimes, but Grass' didn't, and Grass has been an outspoken supporter of denazification for sixty years.