Nobel prize winning German author Guenter Grass gesturing during a press conference at the Buddenbrookhaus in Luebeck, northern Germany, June 2001
BERLIN (AFP) - Nobel prize winning German author Guenter Grass has made the stunning confession that he was drafted into Nazi Germany's notorious Waffen SS elite force during World War II, prompting his biographer to lament the "end of a moral authority".
The 78-year-old Grass told Saturday's edition of the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that he revealed this for the first time in his memoir "Peeling Onions" which is due to appear in September.
So far, it had only been known that the author, best known abroad for his 1959 novel "The Tin Drum", was conscripted into the German air defence forces.
But in his autobiography he also recounts that he tried to join the Third Reich's submarine forces when he was 15 years old but was rejected because he was too young.
He says that he was drafted into the elite Waffen SS the following year but denies suggestions that he joined willingly.
Grass, for many years a prominent leftist and pacifist, was wounded in 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
"I wanted to make clear once again what happened then and above all things concerning me," he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine. "My silence for all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book," he added. "It had to come out."
Other German authors were displeased with his confession, with Walter Kempowski, 77, saying that it came "a bit late". Grass biographer Michael Juergs was "personally disappointed" and lamented "the end of a moral authority".
Grass, who was born in the Baltic port of Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, said he tried to join the submarine forces to flee his oppressive family but now saw the idea as "crazy".
At the time Grass said he was "not at all repulsed by the Waffen SS"; only later did he have "feelings of guilt and shame".
"I was stupid enough to believe that Germans would not do such things and took it all for propaganda," until the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, he added.
Grass, who was 11 when the war started in September 1939, said he never fired a shot during his time with the feared elite force whose notoriety he only grasped once his unit had been defeated, when one of his superiors ordered him to get rid of his uniform.
Grass was held at a PoW camp at Bad Aibling in southern Bavaria, where US forces also detained Joseph Ratzinger who was to become Pope Benedict XVI.
He said in the interview he befriended a certain Joseph at the camp whom he described as "very Catholic", but did not say whether he in fact was Ratzinger.
"I wanted to become an artist and he wanted a Church career," he said, adding that Joseph was "a bit hung up but a nice guy".
Grass was a close friend of post-war West Germany's first social democratic chancellor Willy Brandt who had escaped Nazi persecution in Germany and had close links with German anti-Nazi forces in Norway and Sweden.
He campaigned for the Social Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s and joined the party in 1982, resigning in 1993 in protest over restrictions to Germany's asylum laws.
He was awarded the Nobel literature prize in 1999.
....................................................................................................................................................
