Turns out America-hating, Soviet Union-loving anti-capitalist Guenter Grass, Germany’s moralizing Nobel laureate, was a member of the Waffen-SS. You remember them. They’re the ones with the lightning bolts on their collars and the death’s head on their caps. That SS. The Schutzstaffel.
Heinrich Himmler’s black-clad killers. Grass, who for decades has
preached to Germans that they must face up to their Nazi past, always
said he was in the Wehrmacht, the regular army. He tries to downplay
his SS membership, saying he didn’t even know at first that he was in
it:
Asked
when he had first realised that he was in the SS, Grass replied: “I’m
not sure how it was. Did the draft order give it away, or on the
letterhead? The rank of the signatory? Or did I first notice it when I
arrived in Dresden?” He said at the time that there was nothing
“repulsive” about the SS to him.He did not give
any details as to whether he knew whether his division, the 10th Tank
Division Fundsberg was involved in any atrocities, but claimed that he
never fired a single shot.
This explanation sounds a lot like “the dog ate my homework.” I
think there is a lot more that will be revealed about this. This has
the earmarks of a pre-emptive strike in advance of huge revelations yet
to come. Just a feeling. It didn’t work for Kurt Waldheim, and he wasn’t even SS.
