Former Polish President Lech Walesa wants German writer Guenter Grass to give up his honorary citizenship of Gdansk for having served in the Waffen SS. A seasoned left-wing campaigner and pacifist, Grass this weekend shocked the world by admitting he had been in the notorious elite force that underpinned one of the most abominable regimes known to humanity
Until now, it was only known that the Nobel Prizewinner had served as a soldier and was wounded and taken prisoner by US forces.
Grass was born in 1927 in Gdansk, then known as Danzig, the birthplace of Walesa's Solidarity movement, which began the final phase of the battle against Soviet communism. The Waffen SS was the combat arm of Adolf Hitler's notorious elite force, which expanded to nearly one million members during World War II.
The SS had a reputation for brutality toward soldiers and civilians in Nazi-occupied Europe. It ran the death camps in which millions of people - mostly Jews - were murdered.
For someone who wrote an acclaimed anti-Nazi novel -- The Tin Drum – Grass’s decades of silence smacked of dishonesty. Walesa, a Nobel peace laureate and honorary citizen of Gdansk, was right when he said the German author would never have received the honor had it been known he was in the SS.
Yet it is equally true that the world would not have known of Grass’ SS role had he not had the courage to acknowledge it. Burdened by this silence, Grass finally chose to speak. He told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that he had been drafted at the age of 17 into an SS tank division and had served in Dresden. Few details of his service are known other than that he had served in the Frundsberg Panzer Division after failing to get a posting in the submarine service. This much we know: Grass was no Heinrich Himmler.
Clearly, Grass has suffered immensely in silence for his dark past. The latest revelation certainly casts a shadow on his legacy. His contrition – courageous in no small measure – should count for something.
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