16 August 2006
German Literature Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass has said he felt 'shame' for serving in the Nazis' notorious Waffen SS in the final months of World War II. However, in his first television interview after admitting membership of the Waffen SS last week, Grass said: "What I am experiencing is an attempt to make me a non-person, to cast doubt on everything I did in my life after that. And this later life has been marked by shame," Grass told ARD television. Asked why he had waited until the twilight of his life to reveal his guilty secret, 78-year-old Grass said that was the central theme of his forthcoming autobiography "Peeling Onions". "It is the subject of the book, I worked on it for three years, and everything I have to say on the subject is in it. Whoever wants to judge me, may judge me," he said in the interview given while on holiday in Denmark. The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Charlotte Knobloch, suspects that Grass' belated admission might have been be motivated by an intention to promote his new book. Meanwhile, "Spiegel Online" reports, citing documents, that Grass told US military investigators in 1946 that he had been in the Waffen SS.
