Nobel Prize Winner Grass Under Fire for Belated SS Confession

Nobel prize winning author Günter Grass is facing a backlash from contemporaries and commentators after he admitted that he was drafted into Nazi Germany's notorious Waffen SS elite force during World War II.

The 78-year-old Grass told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the stunning confession would feature in his memoir "Peeling Onions," which is due to appear in September. So far, it had only been known that the author, best known abroad for his 1959 novel "The Tin Drum," was conscripted into the German air defense forces.

But in his autobiography he also recounted that he tried to join the Third Reich's submarine forces when he was 15 years old but was rejected because he was too young. He said that he was drafted into the elite Waffen SS the following year but denied suggestions that he joined willingly.

Grass, for many years a prominent leftist and pacifist, was wounded in 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.

"I wanted to make clear once again what happened then and above all things concerning me," he told the newspaper. "My silence for all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book. It had to come out."