Grass confesses serving in elite Nazi force SS

Grass said his wartime secret had been weighing on his mind and was one of the reasons he wrote a book of recollections, Peeling Onions, which will hit the stands in September. 8216;8216;My silence through all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book,8217;8217; the paper quoted Grass as saying. 8216;8216;It had to come out finally.8217;8217; One of the most powerful organisations in Nazi Germany, the SS played a key role in the Holocaust, establishing and operating the death camps in which millions died.

Grass was wounded in 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp and later became a prominent peace activist. He said he had volunteered for army service as a way of breaking away from home and family.

8216;8216;For me, it was primarily about getting out of there. Out of that corner, away from my family,8217;8217; he told the paper. 8216;8216;I wanted to put an end to that and that8217;s why I volunteered for the army. It was like that for many of my generation,8217;8217; he said. 8216;8216;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.8217;8217;

Grass won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He is viewed as part of the artistic movement known in German as Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung or 8216;8216;coming to terms with the past.8217;8217;

Grass opposed the reunification of Germany in 1990, arguing that the country would be in danger of reverting to its role as a war-mongerer.