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Nobel Literature laureate Guenter Grass (AP)
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| By Associated Press November 10, 2006 |
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An Israeli college has withdrawn its offer to award an honorary doctorate to Nobel Literature laureate Guenter Grass because he served in a murderous Nazi unit in Germany during World War II.
Grass, who became a voice of morality in postwar Germany for urging Germans to confront their Nazi-era crimes, dropped a bombshell earlier this year when he revealed that as a teenager he'd fought in the Waffen SS, the Nazi elite guard.
The author responded this week to the Netanya Academic College's decision with an emotional letter asking that his history and accomplishments since the war "be acknowledged as a counterweight" to his service in the Nazi unit.
During the war, Waffen SS units ran death camps in which millions of people perished.
Only two weeks before he disclosed his SS past, the writer met with college representatives, including vice president David Altman, to discuss the degree ceremony. Grass candidly discussed his past in the Hitler Youth, a paramilitary group to which many young Germans belonged, but gave no indication of his impending disclosure, Altman said.
The revelation prompted the college to call off plans to honor him.
"We wanted to know why he did this, and why he, a man of conscience, hid it for so many years," Altman said. "We felt we needed an explanation."
Grass responded this week with an open letter, published Friday by Israel's Haaretz newspaper, in which he explained that he had not volunteered for the SS, and that his active duty consisted of two weeks of fighting around Berlin near the war's end.
Grass also asked that his "activity as a writer and an artist and an involved citizen in my country" be seen by Israelis as a "counterweight" to his actions as a young man.
Still, he wrote, "I must also accept that the SS will be a mark of Cain for me from now until the end of my days."
Grass's confession this summer prompted calls for him to return the Nobel Prize he won in 1999. Former Polish leader Lech Walesa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, urged Grass, an honorary citizen of the Polish city of Gdansk, to return his honorary citizenship.
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