Günter Grass admits SS Past and more

[Ingsoc]

Originally Posted by Helmut Von Moltke

NOT ALL WAFFEN-SS SOLDIERS WERE EVIL OR NATIONAL SOCIALISTS



K

Wasn't it require to be a NSDAP member to join the W-SS? so indeed the W-SS soldiers were Nazis.

[Klaus]

Where to look for a national socialist if not in the Waffen SS?

[Lancer44]

Originally Posted by Helmut Von Moltke

"Nazi troops".. yawn.. why does this phrase come out al the time?

Not all Americans are cowboys.
Not all Russians are communists.
Not all Englishmen are gentlemen and drink tea.
Not all Frenchmen drink champagne.
Not all Italians drink spaghetti.
NOT ALL WAFFEN-SS SOLDIERS WERE EVIL OR NATIONAL SOCIALISTS



K

Heil Helmut!

And not all Poles drink vodka - some drink pure spirit!

BTW I would like to drink spaghetti...
Shall I boil them first in water or try to drink them dry?

Cheers, mate!

Lancer44

[Lancer44]

Originally Posted by Klaus

Where to look for a national socialist if not in the Waffen SS?

In "Meinl" shops.
I'm serious. Communism or ... (socialism as some prefere), which I know, was very close to Nazional Socialism.
Extrapolating - all pure and true nazis were close to source of good food, lovely ladies, warm dunas, good alcohol and what else you need during the war...

I can bet that I'm right. The most fanatical nazis were experts in camouflaging themselves at least 200 to 300 kilometres behind the front in warm and pleasant environment.

Waffen SS were not nazis - they were deranged kids sent into hell - no wonder some of them become devils.

They were sometimes fanatical Hitlers followers - BUT NOT NAZIS!

Cheers,

Lancer44

[Klaus]

"They were sometimes fanatical Hitlers followers - BUT NOT NAZIS!"

I like your point. And it is correct as you put it.

[Lancer44]

Originally Posted by Klaus

"They were sometimes fanatical Hitlers followers - BUT NOT NAZIS!"

I like your point. And it is correct as you put it.

Hi Klaus,

I'm glad you're back and hope your health is OK.

What I said and you agreed and pointed, is very important when judging some so called neo-nazis. Media are looking at some thugs which just want to provoke another football brawl. Wrong!

We should look at some blokes which want to control banks sector!

Cheers,

Lancer44

[Helmut Von Moltke]

Ingsoc, while it is true that before the war many SS-VT and LAH men were died in the wool party members, towards the end of the war many Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine personell were transferred into the Waffen-SS, and all volksdeutsche or Germans who were drafted could end up in the Waffen-SS. For example, men of the Eastern Waffen-Grenadier divisions were not considered memebrs of the SS organisation because of racial reasons, unlike the normal premier SS Divisions.

Regards,

K

[Tom Houlihan]

Actually, I've corresponded or spoken with a few. Even before the mass levies of Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe troops into the SS, Party membership was not predominant. I'd have to look at the officer roster I have for NORD, but off the top of my head, I want to say that most of them were not Party members. I don't know for sure about the enlisted types, but I'd guess an even smaller percentage.

Just look at any military group today. How many of the rank and file are actually politically motivated, in any direction? Most of them could care less about politics. Oh, they have opinions about their leadership, and party platforms, but very few I served with over 20 years really cared.

[Jim O]

Günter Grass: I needed time to reveal my Waffen-SS past

Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Wednesday September 13, 2006


Günter Grass, the Nobel laureate whose confessions of SS membership during the second world war have shocked his native Germany, has denied lying about his past and claimed he simply needed time to tell his own story.

In an interview in Spain's El País newspaper, Grass replied to his critics while admitting he would probably have been involved in war crimes had he been a bit older and joined the notorious Waffen-SS earlier. "I was young, and I wanted to leave home. In my heart, it was something I agreed with," he said, explaining how he joined up as a 17-year-old in the dying stages of the war. "I considered the Waffen-SS to be an elite unit," he added. "If I had been born three or four years earlier I would, surely, have seen myself caught up in those crimes."

He kept this episode of his life, which he has now included in an autobiography, to himself for more than six decades because of a growing sense of shame.

"What was published later about the Waffen-SS, about all its crimes, was something I was not aware of until much later," he explained. "My sense of shame grew over time ... which is largely why this unique episode in my life was something that I kept to myself." He denied, however, actively hiding his past. "I've always admitted my involvement as a young man in the [Nazi] system," he said. "That has never been a secret."

Grass explained that, over time, he became more able to cope with his former self. "That made it possible to do something that was not at all easy - to take that child of 1939, who seemed like such a distant person to me, and converse with him," he said. "Little by little I managed to get through the layers to the person who grew up locked inside the ideological system of National Socialist era.

"People can criticise and that is something I have to accept. But I also reserve for myself the right to keep certain questions to myself until I find a way to express them," he said.

"I have not said anything false."

Grass only spent a short time at the front, at a time when the German army, and the Waffen-SS itself, was falling apart.

He was more ashamed, he said, that he had failed to react to his uncle's execution by the Nazi authorities or the imprisonment of one of his schoolteachers.

His mother was later repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers in their home city of Danzig.

Grass attacked his new critics, including the Hitler biographer Joachim Fest, who died yesterday. "He is the last person who can say anything about this after publishing a book which gives credit to all that Albert Speer said," he said. "Some people have tried to use this to wipe me out as a political citizen and say I must now keep my mouth shut. That is stupid."

Source: Guardian

[Jim O]

Perhaps he is more a hypocrite than I thought originally:

Guenter Grass wins suit against paper over letters on Nazi era


German Nobel literature laureate Guenter Grass has won a legal battle against the newspaper to which he made the shock confession that he had served with the Nazis' Waffen SS in World War II.

Grass, 78, gained an injunction against the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) stopping the respected broadsheet from re-publishing two letters Grass wrote to former Economy and Finance Minister Karl Schiller.

"The letters are protected by copyright," the Berlin district court ruled according to a written decision given by Grass's attorney Paul Hertin to German news agency DPA.

In the letters written in 1969 and 1970 and published last month in the FAZ, Grass urged Schiller to come clean about his Nazi past.

Schiller (1911-1994) had been a member of the Nazi party and its paramilitary organization SA, German for "Storm Division".

The court ruled the letters could now only be printed with Grass's permission. The FAZ said it would appeal the verdict.

The newspaper had argued that the public's right to know about the letters' content took precedence over Grass's right to privacy in light of the author's late revelation of his own Nazi-era secrets.

Grass told the FAZ in an interview in August that he had been conscripted into the elite corps responsible for some of the Nazis' worst atrocities at the age of 17, just months before the war's end, although he insisted he never fired a shot with the force.

The late announcement sparked deep disappointment in Germany in an author who had often served as a moral compass in the postwar period and demanded the country honestly reckon with the Third Reich.

The FAZ interview was published just before his latest memoir "Peeling Onions" hit bookstores, in which Grass describes his ideological seduction by the Nazis and his time in the notorious corps.

Grass railed against the FAZ last week during a visit to a major book fair, saying that the letters were "personal" and accusing the newspaper of "butchering the principles of good journalism".

His publisher Steidl said last week that the rights to "Peeling Onions" had been sold to another 33 countries.


Source: The top news headlines on current events from Yahoo! News