On Gunter Grass and the SS

A great deal of loud pomposity has been made of Gunter Grass' recent revelation, made during a tour for his latest release "Peeling the Onion", that he was a member of the Waffen SS during the final months of the war.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pa�s, called the negative reaction to Mr. Grass's confession"hypocritical from many people who are not probing their ownconsciences." He added: "He was 17 years old. Does the rest of hislife not count?" The 150,000 copies of "Peeling Onions" in print are nearly sold out.

Saramago is overstating what might otherwise be a good argument. That a big deal is being made out of G�nter Grass� failure to disclose his SS service has nothing to do with other people. However, the extent of the reaction needs to be more carefully measured in light of the circumstances facing Grass at the time he joined the SS as well as what I think is normal human behavior. Saramago has been quoted several times as being anti-Israel and anti-Jew.

Grass was 17 when he joined up with the SS. I think that he never grew out of the 17 year-old�s view of himself at least with respect to his SS membership. I think that someplace in his psyche he knew that what he did was wrong, even evil. Instead of facing it as a youth, young man, in middle age or even well into his later years, he kept it the secret it had been when he decided on his own, as a 17 year old, that it was something that he could never reveal. As his mortality comes into clearer focus at the age of 78, Grass has probably figured out that it really doesn�t matter to him any more and that his life will be judged on some other bases than his brief but emotionally scarring service in the SS. After the war ended, the Allies separated out the members of the Waffen SS for �special handling� as they were presumed (rightly so) to be the fiercest of Nazi believers and fighters. Those that were in US Prison camps for example, here in the US, were sent to �reeducation camps� after the war�s end and were held, in some cases, for nearly a year and a half after the war�s formal end on May 8, 1945. This was in stark contrast to most members of the Wermacht who were treated as �ordinary soldiers� and released into the community. The Nuremberg trials after the war (as well as those lesser-remembered trials held by France, Britain and Russia) brought out the ghastly, comprehensive actions of the SS. They were the ones who were held up as the personification of evil. Perhaps as a 17 year old, he knew of the killings of Slavs in Russia by Einsatzgruppen after Operation Barbarossa: he would have been 13 or 14 between June 1941- December 1941 when Barbarossa was underway. Perhaps he didn�t. It is sure that in 1945 he, like many young men were deathly afraid of the Russians. That front during most of 1945 was closing in from the East while at the same time the Western allies closed in on Berlin from the West. The RAF and USAAF were bombing German cities every day and night � the equivalent of the terror bombings that people have accused Israel of perpetrating recently (though the parallel is not there � the Allied Air Forces deliberately bombed German cities with the aim of terrorizing their populations in order to kill civilian morale as well as people. Israel bombed Southern Beirut and other areas where Hezb�Allah were launching rockets and then hiding amongst civilians for cover. Israel has never had the intent to deliberately kill civilians.) Grass was watching his country be totally and utterly destroyed and undoubtedly wanted to try to save it. I find it difficult to believe that Grass would have stopped to ask whether the SS was involved in mass extermination. I don�t know if it would have made a difference to him. He saw Deutschland being destroyed in front of his eyes and perhaps wanted to be in the �elite� corps of men whch, at the end of the war, was accepting children like him as cannon fodder to throw against the approaching Russians on the East and other allied powers on the West. They were accepted at such a young age precisely because they would follow orders and not ask questions. Grass was apparently one of them.

Not having read his autobiography, I can�t say what Grass� experiences were after the war. We have his writings to look at. It is clear from his hiding of his SS experience that he knew that it was something that would not have been acceptable to very many people, especially in the US and Western Europe who would have been his main readers and supporters when he began his writing career. And instead of �confessing� his past, he elected to hide it, in my view never outgrowing the mental abilities of a 17 year old to come to terms with belonging to an organization whose leaders and members committed in the most horrific crime against humanity ever perpetrated.

If anything, his failure to disclose this piece of his past will serve to color his past writings if only to the extent that they can be reinterpreted in light of his emotional incapacity to face the moral and ethical consequences of the choices he made during the war, in particular his election to join the SS.