Grass ashamed of his SS past

Grass has been severely criticised after revealing at the weekend that he had enrolled in the elite unit in 1945 at the age of 17, although he insists he never fired a shot.

He had previously admitted only that he had served in an air defence unit.

Grass, arguably Germany's greatest post-war writer, said he had felt insulted by the reaction to his admission.

"What I am experiencing is an attempt to make me a persona non grata, to cast doubt on everything I did in my life after that. And this later life has been marked by shame," Grass said in an interview with ARD television shown in part on Tuesday. The full version is to be broadcast on Thursday.

Grass, 78, said he had waited more than 60 years to reveal his secret because he had wanted to fully explain his past in his autobiography "Peeling Onions", whose release date was moved forward to Wednesday due to the massive attention the revelation has drawn.

"It is the subject of the book, I worked on it for three years, and everything I have to say on the subject is in it. Whoever wants to judge me, may judge me," he said.

Grass achieved worldwide fame when he wrote "The Tin Drum" in 1959, a book examining Germany's Nazi past which established him as a literary giant and icon of the German left.

He has been severely criticised by writers, historians and politicians because he has passed judgement on the wartime deeds of many fellow high-profile Germans.

"Gunter Grass's literary work remains intact but his status as a moral reference point, which he has always seen himself as, has been damaged," Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said.

The Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper reported on Wednesday that Grass had made his admission now because it would have been revealed in records due to be released in the next six months by the former East German secret police, the Stasi.

Some prominent Germans have called for Grass to be stripped of his Nobel prize for literature he won in 1999, but the Nobel Foundation rejected those calls.

"Prize decisions are irreversible," the chairman of the Nobel Foundation, Michael Sohlman, told AFP.

German newspapers have reported that Grass' involvement in the Waffen SS could have been easily checked by consulting other wartime records, including archives stored in Berlin.

The Tagesspiegel newspaper on Wednesday printed a photograph of Grass' imprisonment record compiled by US forces when he was a PoW in Marienbad in what is today the Czech Republic.

The Waffen SS was the combat division of Adolf Hitler's notorious elite force which had a reputation for brutality in Nazi-occupied Europe and ran the death camps in which millions of people -- mainly Jews -- were killed.