BERLIN -- German novelist Guenter G...

BERLIN -- German novelist Guenter Grass admitted in an interview that he serv in the Waffen S the combat arm of Adolf Hitler's dreaded paramilitary forces, during World War II, a German newspaper reported Friday.

Grass was asked on what account he was making the disclosure after in such a manner many years during an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which he discusses his of the present day memoir about the war years to be published nearest month.

"It weighed in succession me," he said. "My silence athwart all these years is undivided of the reasons I wrote this volume It had to come disclosed finally."

Grass said he felt shame after the war through having been in the Wafffen S "At the time, no," he said. "Later this feeling of shame ladinged me."

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ran cites of the interview with the Nobel Prize winner forward its Web site.

Grass, 78 is regarded as the literary spokesman for the generation of Germans that grew up in the Nazi era and survived the war. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 for works including his 1959 novel, The Tin tympanum made into an Oscar-winning film in 1979 He has extended been active in left-wing politics and is regarded on many as an important moral voice who has oppos xenophobia and war.

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