PRECEDING THE RELEASE OF Grass's memoirs Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (12 August 2006) published an interview, conducted by Frank Schirrmacher and Hubert Spiegel, in which the author for the first time publicly admitted to having been a member of the Waffen SS in the waning months of the Second World War. This statement caught the media and public by surprise and caused a sensation, because it radically changed what had been considered common knowledge about the author's military service. While Grass had never tried to hide his youthful belief in and commitment to Nazi doctrine until and beyond the end of the war, it was generally assumed, based on his utterances and writings, that he had spent the last months before the collapse of the Third Reich primarily as a Flakhelfer — a far cry indeed from his presumable role in a military unit that was declared a criminal organization during the Nuremberg trials. Although the Waffen SS had lost its elite status during the final phase of the war and had to rely on draftees, as was explained in an unsigned contribution accompanying the interview, Schirrmacher, in an article entitled “Das Geständnis” (2006; The Confession) expressed his great astonishment that for more than sixty years Grass had maintained his silence about a detail of his biography that seemed strangely at odds with his decade-long vociferous, stalwart opposition to any attempt to suppress or minimize German guilt about Nazi crimes.