The diminutive hero of The Tin Drum, Oskar Matzerath, fools everybody with his manic drumming and his glass-shattering screams into thinking that he is retarded. Now it seems that the author of this modern classic, Günter Grass, has fooled everybody with his 60-year silence.

Until his astonishing confession last weekend that he fought for the Waffen SS, Grass was far more than Germany’s most celebrated living writer. For the postwar generations, he was the moral arbiter of the nation. Overnight, he has become a symbol of the hypocrisy and bad faith that he spent his life denouncing.

The admission has shocked Germany to the core. There are demands that Grass should return his Nobel Prize for Literature and countless other honours. The eminent historian Joachim Fest spoke for many when he declared: “I would not buy a second-hand car from this man.”

Grass had no time for the men who rebuilt Germany. He poured scorn on the American liberators of his country and even wanted to preserve East Germany as a separate state because he feared a Nazi revival. He latterly refused to visit London because he disapproved of Tony Blair. Grass was the harshest possible judge of everyone except himself.

To understand why Germans are so angry with Grass, one must grasp not only the exalted status of the intellectual there, but also the unique horror associated with the SS. There is no comparison between the SS, which was declared a criminal organisation by the Nuremberg tribunal, and, for example, the Hitler Youth, to which millions of German teenagers belonged. The Waffen SS, the military wing of which Grass was a member, was involved in many of the worst atrocities of the war.

Grass used to insist that he had been conscripted, first into an anti-aircraft unit and then into the Army. Now he says that as a teenager he had volunteered to join the Navy, but was instead assigned to an SS Panzer Division, the “Frundberg”. However that may be, Grass’s unit fought at Arnhem and later at the Battle of Berlin. In the last weeks of the war, it was ordered to rescue the Führer from his bunker, but was stopped by the Red Army at Cottbus, where Grass was wounded. The bottom line is that he nearly died trying to save Hitler’s life.

We shall have to wait until Grass’s autobiography, Peeling the Onion, is published next month to find out more about what he actually did in the war. Cynics will say that he has engineered the grandfather of all publi- city stunts to ensure that the book is a bestseller. Kinder souls will say “better late than never”. Most Germans, however, simply feel betrayed again by a man with a moustache