Renowned German author Guenter Grass, who received a Nobel laureate in 1999, smokes a pipe in front of his house in Luebeck, northern Germany, in this June 25, 1997 file photo, after his house was smeared with swastikas the night before
BERLIN - The head of Germany's main Jewish organization on Tuesday criticized novelist Guenter Grass for waiting decades to reveal that he had served during World War II in the Waffen-SS, the Nazis' dreaded paramilitary force.
Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews, said the admission negated Grass' longtime criticisms of German politics and society for not adequately dealing with the Nazi past.
"His long years of silence over his own SS past reduce his earlier statements to absurdities," Knobloch was quoted as saying by the Netzeitung online newspaper.
Grass has been widely criticized after his admission in an interview published Saturday in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that he had served in the Waffen-SS. In the interview, he expressed shame at having been part of the organization and said he was making the admission because "it weighed on me."
Previously, it was only known that he worked as an assistant to anti-aircraft gunners — a common duty for teenagers at the time — and that he was wounded before being captured by U.S. troops.
Grass said he volunteered at age 15 for the submarine service and was refused, only to be called up for military service at 17. When he reported for duty in Dresden, he found it was with the 10th SS Panzer Division "Frundsberg."
He said that under the sway of Nazi indoctrination he did not view the Waffen-SS as something repulsive, but as an elite force.
Knobloch pointed out that Grass has a memoir coming out on Sept. 1. The book details his SS experiences.
"The fact that this late admission comes so shortly before the publication of his new book raises the suspicion that this is a PR measure," she was quoted as saying.
Grass' critics have included Joachim Fest, a leading author on the Nazi period, and former Polish president Lech Walesa, who said Grass should give up his honorary citizenship in his hometown of Gdansk, Poland. The city was called Danzig when Grass was born there in 1927.
A Forsa poll for Stern magazine showed 87 percent of those surveyed did not agree that Grass should give back his 1999 Nobel Prize for literature, as some critics have demanded. Eight percent said yes and 5 percent did not know in the survey of 1,005 people taken Monday. No margin of error was given.
Michael Sohlman, head of the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, was quoted as saying by the Dagens Nyheter newspaper that the Nobel Prizes cannot be revoked.
"The decisions are absolute and it has never happened that a prize has been revoked," Sohlman said.
Officials at the Swedish Academy, which awards the literature prize, declined to comment on the issue.
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It's like he wants people to feel sorry for him that he saw the Nazis as an elite group when he was with them. Plus he wants to get his heroic war stories out there, AND absolve his guilt of holding a secret. End result, I'm just sickened by the idea that there are any Nazis left alive, and that now they feel enough time has passed to admit it, and perhaps sway public opinion towards something like "The Nazis were bad, but not the people who wore the uniforms". ??!
We have a best selling novelist, a pulitzer prize winning novelist trying to sell a book now on "My Nazi memoirs: I'm not that bad now, am I?" It's totally creepy. We can't get to a point in the world where we can say "Sure, being a Nazi was OK." We can't. I mean for the good of the world. I don't care if everyone in the Nazi party has to hide out until they die or whatever. It's not like this guy is admitting that the Nazis committed horrible atrocities that groups of people deny either. He, (like all of them who talk about it) never did a thing, he just admired the ideology and volunteered. We still have people, high profile celebrities even, that deny the holocaust happened. And now we have Nazi's outing themselves and saying "read about my Nazi adventures...coming to a bookstore near you". And it's not like genocide doesn't happen today. We can't ever get to a point where we say being a Nazi was "ok". It's just not. Hide out until you die. Be ashamed. It's not ok. Facism is not ok, genocide is not ok, racism is not ok, bigotry is not ok, being dazzled by a "white future" is not ok. You should be ashamed. Making money on your Nazi memoirs is shameful, especially when it's like "I never did anything bad personally. I just thought it was a party."
