Two German novelists revealed as former teen Nazis

Two of Germany's leading novelists, Martin Walser and Siegfried Lenz, were inducted into the Nazi Party as 16-year-old boys late in the Second World War, it has been revealed.

Both men angrily denied this week that they had sought Nazi party membership. It was suggested that local party officials had compelled schoolboys to enroll en masse, perhaps as a "birthday gift" to dictator Adolf Hitler.

The controversy, triggered by journalists fishing for famous names in a Berlin archive of Nazi Party records, has echoes of last year's disclosure by German Nobel Literature laureate Guenter Grass that he enlisted at age 17 in the Waffen SS, the Nazi Party army.

Lenz, whose principal novel, the German Lesson, is about childhood in Nazi Germany, is a notable supporter of the Social Democratic Party.

The debate this week has brought home to Germans that even a childhood connection with the Nazis can still unleash a powerful storm today. That in turn illustrates why Germans of the Second World War generation have largely held back from discussing personal complicity.

The Nazi Party membership records are not yet freely searchable. Researchers are only allowed to apply to see files relating to modern public figures. Journalists who go looking for names risk being accused of muck-raking.