by Günter Grass, page 110-111
The question is: Was I frightened by what was obvious then in the recruitment office as I am terrified now by the double S, even as I write this more than sixty years later?
There is nothing carved into the onion skin that can be read as a sign of shock, let alone horror. I more likely viewed the Waffen SS as an elite unit that was sent into action whenever a breach in the front line had to be stopped up, a pocket like Demyansk forced open, a stronghold like Kharkov regained. I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent. The boy, who saw himself as a man, was probably more concerned with the branch of the service: if he was not destined for the submarines, which hardly came up in the radio bulletins any longer, then he would be a tank gunner in a division which, as everyone in the Weisser Hirsch regional headquarters knew, was to be freshly raised under the name `Jorg von Frundsberg’.
Von Frundsberg was known to me as the leader of the Swabian League during the sixteenth-century Peasant Wars, and as `father of the Landsknechts’ – crack infantry mercenaries. Someone who stood for freedom, liberation. Besides, the Waffen SS had a European aura to it: it included separate volunteer divisions of French and Walloon, Dutch and Flemish, and many Norwegian and Danish soldiers; there were even neutral Swedes on the eastern front in the defensive battle, as the rhetoric went, to save the West from the Bolshevik flood.
So there were plenty of excuses. Yet for decades I refused to admit to the word, and to the double letters. What I had accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame. But the burden remained, and no one could alleviate it.
True, during the tank gunner training, which kept me numb throughout the autumn and winter, there was no mention of the war crimes that later came to light, but the ignorance I claim could not blind me to the fact that I had been incorporated into a system that had planned, organized, and carried out the extermination of millions of people. Even if I could not be accused of active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.
page 119
I can’t seem to turn the other members of the Jorg von Frundsberg division, which now feels quite unreal, into flesh and blood. From the training camp in the Bohemian Woods we were transferred group by group to a number of outlying garrisons: one lot set off in the direction of Vienna, another was sent to defend Stettin. Mine was taken one night on a freight train via Tetschen-Bodenbach to Dresden, then farther east into Lower Silesia, where the front was reputed to be.
All that remains in my mind of Dresden is the smell of burning and the sight – through the slightly open sliding door of the freight car – of charred bundles piled one on top of the other between tracks and in front of scorched facades. Some claimed to have seen shrivelled corpses, others heaven knows what. We covered up our horror then by quarrelling over what had happened, much as today what happened in Dresden lies buried under verbiage.
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