Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The German debate about what to do with Waffen-SS member and Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass has reached a surreal state. The old guard of prize-stuffed and feather-bedded "intellectuals" has rallied to his defence, arguing that his enthusiasm for Hitler's genocidal corps was all a youthful jape, while the leftist "intelligentsia" is furiously casting around for a rock to crawl under until the scandal blows over. Sadly for the whole lot of frauds, the opposite appears to be happening.

As soon as the story broke, Grass's biographer, Michael Jürgs, appeared across the media spectrum, almost in tears, declaring how hurt he was by the revelation, which had, of course, blown a huge hole in his own credibility as a "biographer". But worse was to come for him because it has since become public that when Grass surrendered to US forces, he declared that he was an SS member. This fact was duly noted and placed in the records. Where it lay for 60 years, unread. Clearly, Jürgs never bothered to check and not one member of Germany's supremely arrogant journalistic troop (troupe?) saw the need to take a look, either. ( Here it is.) This is the same gang, by the way, that devotes acres of print and gigabytes of video to rehashing the latest item about Guantanamo (without once crediting Matt Drudge from whom they lift their stories) and feeling smug about their superiority.

But the best thing about the latest wrinkle on the Grass story is that the US Army documentation shows the young Nazi was given work and $107.20 by his American captors after his surrender. Which makes Grass's life-long rage at the United States more or less understandable, depending upon how you interpret hypocrisy. But maybe the Soviets got a copy, and used it to blackmail him into projecting his hatred at Washington instead of Moscow. Who knows? One thing is certain, though. Grass was a lucky man that it was the Americans and not the Russians who got their hands on him. From Niall Ferguson's The War of The World (page 544), here's an account by Zinaida Pytkina recalling how she dispatched a captured German solider on the Russian front with a shot to the back of the head:

"As a member of the Communist Party, I saw in front of me a man who could have killed my relatives…I would have cut off his head if I had been asked to. One person less, I thought. Ask him how many people he killed — he did not think about this?

This just in: Grass will not have to hand back his Nobel prize. Arafat was allowed to keep his as well. BTW, does all this mean that Gerry Adams is next up for a Nobel? He's written books, he's got facial hair and he's got skeletons in his closet. Somebody call Stockholm!