Gunter Grass - Waffen SS

I wonder from where/what you got that: neither the original interview (How good is your German? Probably you mistranslated something?) nor any of Grass' comments on this suggets such. (He wanted to go the Navy, was too young and when later was conscripted ended up in that SS-unit - like thousands of others of his age.)

From 1944 onwards, SS-units weren't 'seperated' from the Wehrmacht, but you entered them like a normal, regular military unit.


(Bringing confusion to some: higher police officers got SS-ranks as well, although they weren't members of a SS-unit but heading a police force [like the "Ordnungspolizei", the normal, uniformed police].)

He was lucky, in terms of the difference between serving in the Werhmacht or serving in the Waffen SS.

But suggesting that my remarks are self-serving is typical and hilarious Finn drivel. I have no dog in the fight, and i certainly don't care if you or any rightwingnut disparages Grass.

Yes, Walter, i understood that part of it. I was simply referring to the fact that Waffen SS units were commonly better equipped and better supplied than Werhmacht units, although you would know better than i if that were still the case by late 1944. Is it correct that he is described as a "student?" Would that have meant that he was till in training?

Set, I think the part where it says "Schüler - pupil" in the document Walter provided refers to the occupation of the person in civilian life, not to his status in the Wehrmacht (or Waffen-SS, no difference there by '44, as Walter pointed out).

I don't know where Finn got the idea that Grass "was drawn to the elitist nature of the SS, and that he bought into the Nazi message". He said in the interview that, as a kid, he thought that the German submarines were really awesome (might have been an effect of the propaganda - a submarine was probably the least desirable place to be in WWII for a German soldier), and that he always wanted to serve on one. When he was still 15, he applied but wasn't called up.

Only a year later he received a letter that he would be drafted, and finally started service at age 17 - with the Waffen-SS rather than the submarines he had applied for.

He was captured as POW six months later, at the end of the war. His membership in the Waffen-SS was documented back then, and was technically common knowledge. The Wehrmachtsauskunftsstelle (Wehrmacht Information Office) in Berlin confirmed that no request about Grass's documents had been filed for more than a decade, though.

It's tempest in a teapot stuff, OE--but i find it hilarious, coming from conservatives who had no problem with Reagan visiting the Bitburg cemetary in 1985. The white house claimed that Reagan believed that Americans were buried there along with the Germans, which didn't happen to be true (that is, it isn't true that Americans are buried there--as to what the white house did or did not know, and whether they bothered to check, one cannot say). As well, members of the Waffen SS had been buried there.

A classic case of whose ox has been gored.

Is it fair to say that if it were not a well-known fact that Grass's political stance is quite a bit left of center, neither Fox News nor our old friend Finn d'Abuzz would give much of a damn?

I think so.

trying to find detailed information about grass' early life is not particularly easy . perhaps not really much to say about his early life .
it seems that an actual biography about his life has not been written yet .
after checking a number of google sources , it seems that wikipedia is probably the most accurate record - until the actual biography is published .

the english and german versions of wikipedia seem quite consistent .
also , based upon personal experience , i would agree with it unless other information should come forth .

i would summarize his war service as follows :
- he was a highschool-student (gymnasium) until 1942 .
- he was drafted into the "reichsarbeitsdienst" (german labour service - it was called "ditch digging") in 1942 - this was a mandatory service for all german youth .
- he was drafted into the waffen-ss in november 1944 ; again , this was a mandatory service .

my own experience ( for anyone who is interested ) :
i'm 2 1/2 years younger than grass .
in late 1944-early 1945 i was in a school in babylon/bavaria - formerly , and now again , a part of the tschech republic .
schools had been closed in hamburg since 1943 and our school was evacuated to bavaria . our school was actually not very far from marienbad , where grass became a POW .
in early april 1945 our school-administrator was advised that a waffen-ss recruiting team would be coming to our school . while we - the students - were not told of this upcoming "visit" , the teaching staff was well aware of it (our teacher told us the whole story after the war had ended - which was only a month later ! ).
one morning in early april - i can't recall the exact date - we were called early and all the bigger boys were told that we had to get fire-wood for the kitchen from the forest , and that we would be gone all day .
two of our teachers marched through the forest with us for probably a couple of hours , until we were met by a forester . we did some wood-chopping and had a great old time .
of course , we had no idea that the recruiting team had in the meantime arrived at our school .
the smaller and younger boys had been left behind with most of the teaching staff because it was felt that , if the ss-team would find no one at school , it would look just too suspicious .
we came back after darkness and were told to rest at the edge of the forest while one of the teachers went "to check things out " .
since the team had left , we could now go back , have supper and go to bed .
while the students that had remained behind told us about some soldiers "visiting " , we had no clue that those "visitors" had been looking for us .
had it not been for our teachers who had been willing to literally "put their life on the line" for us , we would have wound up as conscripts in the waffen-ss .
there is no doubt in my mind that our teachers would have been in a lot of trouble - they quite possibly might have been executed - if the waffen-ss team would have figured out that they had been fooled .
german army units were already having difficulty moving around during the daytime since allied fighter planes were buzzing around almost constantly , so we never saw the ss-team again .
lucky us !
about april 30 the first u.s. army unit arrived in the village , looked us over and decided that we were just a bunch of kids .
on may 6 1945 we left what now was no longer part of germany (!) , but part of the tschech republic again and started our footmarch back to germany .
our administrator had been told by an american officer that they would be withdrawing shortly and hand things over to the soviet army . so his advice was to get the boys out now !
more luck - or who knows where we would have wound up !

i guess the point i wanted to make - and it took me a long time - was , that grass having been drafted into the waffen-ss was nothing unusual - just some bad luck !
hbg


wikipedia
----------
"Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on October 16, 1927, to Willy Grass (1899-1979), a Protestant ethnic German, and Helene (née Knoff) Grass (1898-1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin [1][2]. The couple had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.

Grass attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine, [3] and was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (1942) and in November 1944 into the Waffen-SS. Grass saw combat with the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was was wounded on April 20th 1945 and sent afterwards to an American POW camp."

wikipedia - german version
-------------------------------
"Günter Grass wurde am 16. Oktober 1927 als Günther Graß in Danzig-Langfuhr geboren. Er stammt aus einer Kaufmannsfamilie. Im Zweiten Weltkrieg wurde er nach Ableistung des Arbeitsdienstes 1944 zur Waffen-SS in der 10. SS-Panzer-Division „Frundsberg" einberufen. Grass wurde am 8. Mai 1945 in Marienbad gefangen genommen und war bis zum 24. April 1946 amerikanischer Kriegsgefangener."


...WIKIPEDIA...

Oh come on Walter. Did you know? All those commentators that are now expressing shock, sympathy or indignation in Germany itself sure didnt, apparently.

Your and Setanta's attitude about this only being INTERNATIONAL news, or only news for Fox, is misplaced.

The book is out now, reported in a few places on google.

Here's one - http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/16/news/grass.php

Grass's publisher releases his memoir early

By Carter Dougherty International Herald Tribune

Published: August 16, 2006


FRANKFURT In the early months of 1945, a young Günter Grass, who had been eager to enter combat on behalf of Nazi Germany, cowered underneath a tank and wet his pants as a relentless Soviet bombardment pounded his division of the Waffen SS.
With a "Stalin's Organ" - a rocket launcher used by the Red Army in World War II - raining death down on his unit, Grass watched in terror. After the barrage ended, a stunned Grass - then 17 - wandered out into the battlefield wasteland.
"Someone was whining like a small child, I stood in my wet pants and looked at the disemboweled body of a boy with whom I had just been gabbing about who knows what," Grass writes in his memoir, "Peeling Onions." The chapter he devotes to his brief military career is called "How I Learned to Fear."
Taking advantage of the ferocious controversy around Grass's admission that he was briefly a member of the Waffen SS in the waning months of the war, Grass's publisher on Wednesday released the book weeks before the planned publication date of Sept. 1.
Claudia Glenewinkel, a spokeswoman for Steidl Verlag, which published this and other Grass works, said it had already delivered 60,000 pre-ordered copies of the books, which seemed to be selling briskly.
"The tsunami arrived," she said. "We had to release the book."
Though his military experience constitutes only about 60 pages of a 479- page book written in Grass's evocative but dense prose, his late confession has made his service in the Waffen SS the focus of the work. Though he has long acknowledged he was a young enthusiast of the Nazi regime, he never revealed that he had been in the Waffen SS, the combat arm of the organization that carried out the Holocaust.
The book begins with his childhood in Danzig, now the Polish city Gdansk. Apart from the war, the book focuses on the decade after 1945, and ends with Grass moving to Berlin in 1959 after a long period in Paris, shortly after the publication of "The Tin Drum," perhaps his best-known novel.
Grass said in an interview to be broadcast Thursday evening on ARD, the German public television network, that he could say little more about the admission, which has provoked widespread dismay in light of his admonitions over the years that Germans need to be open about the past.
"In this book, the issue is there, I worked on it for three years, and everything is in there that I have to say about this issue," Grass said, according to advance excerpts of the interview.


Whether he expressed being eager to enter combat in the book or that was Carter Dougherty's take, I don't know - although I think I've read that he had long admitted being pro nazi in his youth.

How can something be "technically common knowledge" if noone but perhaps a retired archivist knows about it? The surprise that has reverberated about Grass's revelation throughout the German papers and media, from left (the sympathising Taz) to right (the indignant Welt), is real enough. And neither does it cleanly split up between left and right, with leftwingers also accusing Grass of hypocrisy.

It was "technically public knowledge", conceivably - if only in the sense that, even though Grass himself never publicly said or implied a word about it, some reporter could hypothetically have himself come up with the wild idea that this prolific denouncer of all things Nazi could possibly have been in the Waffen SS himself, and if he had, he could have received this document on request.

Thats technically public knowledge I guess but common knowledge it is in no way whatsoever.

I mean, for X-sake, Grass's own biographer has said that he never suspected and that he was dismayed that Grass never said a word about it. He was saving it for his autobiography I guess.

I'm really kind of surprised by the reaction from Set, Walter etc here, trying to play like, you know, this is only news to Fox, its merely a "tempest in a teapot .. coming from conservatives", and concerns something that was "technically common knowledge". I understand the visceral reaction to Finn's shitstirring all too well, but the condescension is just incorrect here - judging on their posts, you sure would never have guessed that this revelation has set German commentators, too, in agitation and shock, from left to right.

osso :
thanks for posting .
the book should be interesting reading .
personally , i was certainly not keen to "die for the fatherland" - but that was probably because my brother who had served on the eastern front , had been wounded quite badly . he impressed upon me not to be foolish enough to volunteer .
but i also knew plenty of kids - and that's really what we were - , who thought it was sort of like a "cowboy and indian" game ; and surely it must be great fun . but i didn't know anyone who thought he might be killed in the "game" !
kind of strange looking back - it happened sixty years ago ... and yet it seems that it just happenend yesterday !
mankind sure hasn't learned much about how gruesome and deadly war is in those sixty years !
hbg

ps it is interesting to note that grass was born and grew up in danzig - which was a "freestate" and not part of germany .
of course , danzig was occupied by the german army immediately when the war started .
if i recall rightly , at least part of the reason for germany starting the war was to "free" the people of danzig "from oppression" .
(amazing how those terms are still being (mis)used today)

Sixty years doesn't seem long to me anymore...

I've never read Grass, had bought Tin Drum once, don't remember what happened to it.

I mean, there's hardly a German writer, politician or editor who hasnt spoken out about this by now. Even former SPD leader Muntefering, when defending Grass, has said that he was displeased that Grass only came with it now. And the president of Germany's Central Council of Jews has positively excoriated Grass.

Over 1,000 German-language results about <Günter Grass waffen> on news.google.de

Here's The Independent:



The NYT:

Yes, at school - about 40 years back - we spoke about that .... was one example about what happened to young Germans .... both in history as well as in German classes ('Blechtrommel' was compulsary to read at my school).

let me state two things :
1) grass should have "come clean" years ago ; he should have told his story , and i think it would have made him more creditable ;
2) i tried to read 'the tin drum' , never got very far with it - perhaps it is more readable in german .

mr fest said :
"I do not understand how someone can elevate himself constantly for 60 years as the nation's bad conscience, precisely in Nazi questions, and only then admit that he himself was deeply involved," Joachim Fest, a prominent historian and biographer of Hitler, told the newspaper Bild. "I don't know how he could play this double role for so long."

i wonder if grass himself stated that "he was DEEPLY involved" ?
how a 17 year old who had been conscripted into (waffen-SS) service could have been "deeply involved" escapes me .

"...play this double role ..." ; i really fail to understand how his life was played out as a "double role" .

let me state again : imo grass would have been more creditable , had he stated openly some years ago that he had been conscripted into the waffen-SS .
reading walter's entry , it seems that , at least in germany , grass' past was not unknown .

i don't think he is disqualified from speaking out against facism , simply because of not declaring his past in every detail .
people , of course , are free to read or not read his books - but does that have anything to do with his past ?
hbg

Fascinating account, Hamburger, thanks for sharing it.

soz : it turns out , i've got a "previous life" too
since i've talked to friends about it and written about it on a2k , i guess i won't have to worry about "being outed " .
hbg

Very thoughtful and reasoable post, hbg.