(no subject)

[somedaybitch]

Instapundit has links to the Gunter Grass revelation here.

Did he miss the right opportunity to discuss his SS membership? "I don't know," says the author and poet. "It's certainly the case that I believed that what I did as a writer was enough. After all, I went through my learning process and reached my own conclusions. But there was still this lingering blemish."

being a *writer*?????? :::sputters incoherently::: being a writer is supposed to be enough to absolve your willing service to the SS????

fuck.you.

Comments

[arthurfrdent.livejournal.com]

look around on this one... and ask yourself exactly how you find forgiveness for being on the side of a war in which parts of your military and government did inhuman and evil things... Nobody has said at this point that he was part of any atrocities, if he were, than he should be tried for them. But if he were merely a 19 year old who was part of a losing army, you might imagine how he would cover this up. I'm not that much a fan, even though I've read tin drum, but his history since has been in opposition to wars and human atrocities. Perhaps he was hoping that would pay someone, somewhere back for being a part of wehrmacht in general... if the data is correct, he was a marine first in the navy before the SS... how high a price do you have to pay for a turn of event in life? How much is enough in retribution? Certainly we here are much more forgiving if you own up to a wrong immediately, ut I'm not sure how many in Europe hid their past after the war simply because any association at all could get you killed.

Take as balance a man named Werner Von Braun. Who was a nazi, and was part of the SS, personally promoted by Himmler several times. It was he who did a great deal to make the V-2 rocket operational. It was he who stood by as slave labor from the concentration camps worked themselves to death building it. He fell out of favor for a while, and ended up jailed. The later work on the V-2 was hidden and as the end approached, he took his scientists, and stole a train to get to the american lines, because of how they felt about the soviets. In essence he was the man most responsible for us having the ICBM before the USSR. After that he went on to become the father of NASA and really all of manned space as we know it.

Is all the enough to forgive him for being what he was in the war? Not only did he personally work on a weapon that killed many, he was personally associated with the Jewish slave labor that built it.

And yet, he was pretty much forgiven, and very few people remember that past.

I have no prayer for that, and I have no answers. You have to pay for what you do, even if it's just what you are a part of. But who do you pay, and when is it enough?

[somedaybitch.livejournal.com]

he willingly joined the nazis. they butchered human beings. he lied about it till now. my sympathy factor is zero. and he can burn in hell.

[arthurfrdent.livejournal.com]

the truth will come out in full, because of the figure he has been since. we will see if he joined the ss willingly or not, but then there were 950,000 ss troops at the end, so you might imagine all the men that have that blood on them. so far there isn't anything to indicate he was actually a nazi, that was the point I was making about von Braun, he did join them, and was one as well as being an ss officer. Later all is forgiven? To me it just isn't cut and dried that being conscripted, and carrying a gun makes you a butcher, unless you were that, unless you did that.

On the other claw, he has for years set himself as a moral authority, has been the voice of people coming clean about their past in the war... all while carrying this secret. He has surely done more to damage that cause than any, and I think this is why so many people have condemned him. This is definitely why I am very disappointed.

But if he had said this in 1946, as von Braun and many others did, would it change the person he or they are today? They still did what they did then, and if indeed they were conscripted into the waffen ss as many were, what difference does that actually make? In my mind, anyway... I will care more about what he actually did, than when he came clean. If he really was just a footsoldier on a doomed side, and didn't participate in atrocities, then I think his guilt is no more than any other german soldier in that wretched time, my take on it fwiw... :shrug: