Grass Admits Serving With Waffen-ss

Günter Grass, the Nobel prize-winning German author, has admitted that he was in the Waffen SS in the second world war.

His declaration that he served in an army unit of Hitler's Nazi elite came in a book about his recollections of war to be published next month. Explaining how the secret weighed on his mind, he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine yesterday: "My silence through all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book. It had to come out finally."

Grass, 78, won international acclaim in 1959 with his first novel, The Tin Drum, voicing the thoughts of a generation raised in the Nazi era who had survived the war.

This, and later works such as Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years, earned him the role of "conscience of his generation" and a Nobel prize in 1999. He has since become part of the artistic movement known in German as Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung or "coming to terms with the past".

As a teenager, he volunteered as a way of breaking away. "For me it was primarily about getting out of there [his home]. Out of that corner, away from my family," he said. "It was like that for many of my generation. We were doing army service and then suddenly, one year later, the draft order was on the table. And then I realised, probably not until I was in Dresden, that it was the Waffen SS."

The SS established and operated the death camps, as well as recruiting and controlling army units. At Nuremberg it was condemned as a criminal organisation.

Writing on the 1945 surrender in the Guardian last year, Grass told of being wounded: "I was a naive 17-year-old, who had believed in the ultimate victory right to the end ... it was not the hour of liberation; rather, I was beset by the empty feeling of humiliation following total defeat."