Gunter Grass and 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1103AP_Poland_Guenter_Grass.html

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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I "wuz" drafted is his story.  He says he first was in a labor unit, then he tried to join the navy (submarines) and then "found himself" in the Waffen SS.  That may well be.  This division was mainly formed from conscripts.   For a long time the Heer (German Army" succesfully resisted allowig the SS to draft Germans, but late in the war that broke down.  Pat Lang

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"During the war the organization was presented as a multinational force protecting Europe from the evils of Communism. In addition, training emphasised unit cohesion and mutual respect between officers and men, rather than strict discipline. In the Waffen-SS, it was not a requirement to salute officers and a more casual salute was adopted (the right arm raised vertically from the elbow - a relaxed version of the Heil salute. This salute is portrayed in many war films). Added to this, the practice of addressing a superior as Herr ("Sir") was also forbidden, with everyone up to Himmler being addressed simply by their rank.   Wiki - Waffen SS

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Actually the Waffen SS was not part of the Wehrmacht at all but rather was a party militia which received greater and greater government support as WW2 turnd into a maelstrom from the German point of view.  The ethos of the Waffen SS was formed in its earliest days when Freikorps front line veterans of WW1 made up the cadre.  Such men have little patience with things like saluting and "sirring" all the time.  The more formalistic trappings of military life are more appealing when "motivating" troops is the first priority.

The Waffen SS more resembled the Pasdaran or the Syrian saraya difaa' (protection companies) than Napoleon's Guard or Saddam's Republican Guard which were army formations rather than formalised militias.  Pat Lang

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Division_Frundsberg

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This was Grass's outfit, one of the higher quality "late" Waffen SS divisions.  Along with its "twin"  SS Panzer Division "Hohenstaufen" it held the bridge at Arnhem in "Operation Market Garden."  You remember. Maximilian Schell played the corps commander (2nd SS Panzer Corps?).  He looked like maybe he had transferred from the Heer (army) in search of promotion.  Some did.

Some of you folks will sort me out on this but I have doubts about Grass's "legend."  Kurt Waldheim has been hounded unmercifully for having been a staff lieutenant in an Army Group headquarters in the Balkans.

Is Gunter Grass going to be given a "pass" for his politics? 

Pat Lang

Comments

[confusedponderer]

IMO it's dramatised. The right in Germany, and Poland, is jubilant they finally got him. Many of them have have axes to grind, and now gleefully go for the hatchet job. So rest assured, thanks to their zeal, he will be thoroughly savaged.

In the Zeit I read the leading historian for Wehrmacht history at the German Army University explaining that and why it could well be he had been drafted, and didn't need to volunteer. The army and SS were beating up each other searching for recruits at the end of the war. In the end even the all-volunteer SS needed to re-fill their loss-depleted ranks, and quietly ended up drafting.

That however, is beside the point, as he volunteered for serving on a U-Boat two years before, and was turned down due to age. He must have been a nazi at that age, but what does that say. A child's a child, and when exposed to teachers, Wochenschau, NS radio and Hitlerjugend leaders selling national socialism as the only true glory, what can one expect.

Btw, I dislike Grass. Don't like his books too.

[b]

Grass was seventeen when this happened.

I did smoke quite a bit of Lebanese red and once a while some Afghan black when I was at that age. Add our personal sins here ...

Grass has been and is a great voice against and mirror for the German and other societies on the path of authoritarian rule.

His mistakes or whatever do not deminish that role.

[John Howley]

Restarting German culture after its plunge into the moral sewer of Naziism was profoundly difficult. Grass made an important contribution to that.
That said, he is clearly guilty of rank opportunism: He would never have been awarded the Nobel Prize if this SS connection were known.

Possibly also hypocrisy: Grass led the charge against Reagan's visit to the Bitburg cemetery where remains of Waffen-SS soldiers are interred.

Interview with Grass in Speigel On-line:
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,432594,00.html

[mark safranski]

I share your doubts.

The Waffen-SS was indeed restricted by Hitler from accessing prime conscripted German manpower for most of the war ( I believe these restrictions were relaxed somewhat after the 1944 bomb plot -I'm shaky on the specifics). On the other hand, Hiimmler had a free hand with ethnic German minorities in Eastern Europe, Alsace-Lorraine and with other non-German "teutonic" nationalities like the Dutch.

It is not completely inconceivable that Grass could have been "conscripted" into the Waffen-SS in 1945 but I find the idea that he might have been eligible for conscription but joined the elite Waffen-SS more likely.

[Walrus]

Well he has "confessed", and he claims he was drafted.

I would imagine, Germans being so thorough about records) that documentary proof will be available.

Seventeen year olds do dumb things. There is a guy a few streets from me called Jack Thomas (Jihad Jack) that has just been released from prison on appeal for allegedly training with Al Qaeeda. According to a friend who knows him, he was a wild child as well.

My view is to give Grass the slack to explain in more detail.

[Green Zone Cafe]

I think he gets a pass, or at least forgiveness. What opportunity did he have to have conscious politics, a choice of political belief? He was 17, and had grown up in Nazi Germany since he was 6 (1933, when Hitler took power). He's a teenager, judgment not developed and shaped by years of Nazi propaganda in schools and everywhere else, it's November 1944 and the enemy is on the borders.

This is different from Waldheim, who was old enough to know better, and who actually might have participated in bad things.

This online exerpt from the "Waffen SS Encyclopedia," says there was Waffen SS conscription: http://www.aberjonapress.com/catalog/wss/excerpt.html

[W. Patrick Lang]

All

Actually, I salute him for "coming clean."

Interesting contrast between the Heer and these guys.

I understand that in standing up the Bundeswehr, the Heer crowd managed to exclude Waffen SS people above a certain rank. So instead the SS made their own army in the Bundesgrenzshutz? Spelling? True? pl

[W. Patrick Lang]

All

Oh, yes, I don't "buy" the "elite" part.

Legends in their own minds. pl

[John O'Dwyer]

Regarding your post on Gunter Grass:

Better start checking up on the Pope then, and while you're at it, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwartzkopf too. No German who lived through that era can be free of its terrible taint.

When I was a student at Manchester (UK) University in the early 1970s, the warden of our residential accommodation was a former member of the Hitler Youth (like the Pope). When I hung out with a rock band in Spain a couple of years later, our lead guitarist's father was a former member of the SS Blue Division (Spanish supporters of General Franco who, as you correctly note, were recruited to the Nazi cause by virtue of its being at war with the Soviet Union).

My background is Irish. Several of my uncles were in the IRA during the Irish war of independence and its subsequent civil war.

Scratch us Europeans just a little bit and you'll find out all manner of skeletons in our family closets.

Finally - and it's a point many people have been making recently - it's not what Gunter Grass did when he was a teenager that makes him the giant man he is today -it's what he learned from that experience and became as a result of it.

John O'Dwyer

[W. Patrick Lang]

John O'Dwyer

Ah, if you thought I was judging him, I was not. pl

[Michael]

News about the Pope's stint with the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI>Hitler Youth and Luftwaffenhelfer didn't seem to be met with much discussion - which surprised me.. so who knows what will happen with Grass.

[W. Patrick Lang]

Michael

Somehow I don't think that Benedict's service in a Luftwaffe flak unit and membership in an organization condemned as criminal are equivalent. pl

[MarcLord]

There is still something odd here. Grass may well have been subjected to much peer and formal recruiting pressure, as any able-bodied 17 year old must have been in 1944 Danzig. But a draft? Danzig was a "free city," its residents predominantly ethnic Germans, so technically it was a foreign country yet it enjoyed status as German-speaking. So it should've been hard for the SS to hold drafts there or otherwise press-gang children.

As for coming clean, it would've been a hard thing to do anytime soon after the war. I knew a man in Germany, Ivan Snowa, originally from the Ukraine who had volunteered into the SS. At the end of the war he couldn't go back to his country yet couldn't stay in Germany as a war criminal, so he went into the French Foreign Legion and fought for ten more years in Indo-China.

Maybe I'll go over to the axis history forum and ask about drafting in Danzig...

[MarcLord]

There is still something odd here. Grass may well have been subjected to much peer and formal recruiting pressure, as any able-bodied 17 year old must have been in 1944 Danzig. But a draft? Danzig was a "free city," its residents predominantly ethnic Germans, so technically it was a foreign country yet it enjoyed status as German-speaking. So it should've been hard for the SS to hold drafts there or otherwise press-gang children.

As for coming clean, it would've been a hard thing to do anytime soon after the war. I knew a man in Germany, Ivan Snowa, originally from the Ukraine who had volunteered into the SS. At the end of the war he couldn't go back to his country yet couldn't stay in Germany as a war criminal, so he went into the French Foreign Legion and fought for ten more years in Indo-China.

Maybe I'll go over to the axis history forum and ask about drafting in Danzig...

[confusedponderer]

PL,
as for Benedict, a good point well made.

It is correct that the Bundeswehr didn't allow former SS officers in. The Bundesgrenzschutz, the federal border guard, was originally a paramilitary formation in it's own right, set up 5 years before the Bundeswehr was conceived. They were securing the borders to communist Europe.

At its foundation the Bundeswehr took over about 9.500 of the 17.000 border guards. Guess they left the SS veterans there.

Interesting bit about 'coming clean'. I think it's the puzzling thing about him - that he helped work up nazi past, and was a part of it, and kept quiet for so long. But then, he did what he did and he had some good effect after the war. That's what counts. He's still annoying, but you can't have it all.

[James McKenzie-Smith]

Attn. Mr. O'Dwyer

Dear Sir,

The Blue Division was a part of the Heer, although several thousand Spaniards did end up in the Waffen SS.

Best regards,

James McKenzie-Smith

[John Shreffler]

Apparently, according to the German U.S. Embassy, most SS recruits were conscripted by that stage of the war:

"Grass’s case was also not so unusual. While the Waffen SS was founded as an elite organization whose members were selected for their “racial purity” and loyalty to Hitler, by 1944 SS leader Heinrich Himmler had ordered all volunteers to be drafted, regardless of their suitability for service. Historian Bernd Wagner notes that forced conscription into the SS became normal by 1942. Ninety-five thousand, or 17.3 percent of all the military recruits born in 1928 (many of whom, like Grass, would not have reached their 18th year by the war’s end) were drafted into the SS this way."

http://www.germany.info/relaunch/info/publications/week/2006/060818/headlines1.html

Not too astonishing as Himmler had planned to do away with the Heer post war. Can't really fault Grass--I'd be ashamed too. The whole country had PTSD for years postwar.

[chimneyswift]

Pat Lang,

Yes, but the Pope is granted official moral authority in his office AND had been in charge of the official "guardians of doctrine" (or whatever) segment of the church.

That of course is the descendent organization of the Inquisition, and it highlights a very authoritarian aspect of a man who was a part of the Hitler youth. Odd combo for a Pope, esp. when the Pope during the war years is now known to have been somewhat a collaborator.

Grass, on the other hand, has no official moral authority, and furthermore has demonstrrated a clear commitment and effectiveness regarding pluralism and liberal society.

Regardless, I would expect the typical double standard to apply: The pope, being conservative, needs to have his dignity respected, while Grass, on the left, is exposed of having questionable integrity.

Sorry so long, etc.
swift

[Angie]

Re: Benedict's Flak and Grass's Walffles.

Don't quite see sainthood for either of them.

Very Strange Thread.

[sonic]

Grass claims he was drafted

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,432189,00.html

Given the situation at the time if he refused it would have been a short walk to the nearest lampost.

[morkfrombrooklyn]

Danzig was no longer a "free city" under the Nazis. The main excuse given for invading Poland was to reagin these territories.

Also, near the wars end, Hitler did allow conscritopn into the SS, so I think Mr Grass confession sounds fine to me.

Let's not forget, he was 17. I was an within an inch of joining the Nation of Islam at 17. We all do and think some stupid things when we are that young.

[McGee]

Pat,

Coming to this post late but I'll add my two pfennigs anyway. Grass's Birthyear (1927) was called up in 1943, and the Waffen SS did start taking conscripts that same year (February 1943 if I remember correctly). So his story is certainly possible and I've seen nothing in the German press up til now to refute it. A lot of hand-wringing but no real questioning of the facts.

BTW, The Tin Drum is an incredibly powerful read in its original German - even more so than in English. Stopped me in my tracks for quite a while in the 60's. And it had a huge and very positive effect on a whole generation of German and European youth. So though I too am troubled by this news am still a huge fan of his writing....

[Eric Dönges]

The moral arrogance of some posters here really angers me. Do you really expect us to believe that if you had been a German teenager in 1944, bombarded by Nazi propaganda since 1933 (or probably more like 1939 in the case of Günther Grass), with your country involved in a total war (look at pictures of Europe during WWII for what total war means), you wouldn't have volunteered to help defend the fatherland ? You would either have to be mature way beyond your age, or the type of self-absorbed coward any society is better off without.

As for me, I know I would have volunteered for, and been thrilled to be accepted into the Waffen SS if a had been 17 in 1944. The fact that I wouldn't dream of "being muscle for the 3rd Reich" today is not because I am somehow morally superior to previous generations, but because I had the good fortune of growing up in post WWII, democratic (West) Germany.

[Mo]

b,
"I did smoke quite a bit of Lebanese red and once a while some Afghan black when I was at that age"

Notice a pattern? Perhaps, after all, it isn't oil Bush and Cheney are after? How good is Iraqi Gold anyway?

[Abu Sinan]

I was born in Germany and lived there for some years. The original Waffen SS were an elite force, and I think their history in the war, at least the first few years, bears this out.

It is interesting to note that I do not believe that Himmler, himself, would have qualified for service in the Waffen SS.

As to the border guards, these guys still have a reputation. I was in Berlin for New Years 1999-2000, many of them were drafted in to help with crowd control. I saw several instances of them pulling out unruly or rude members of the crowd for some summery punishment.