'Adolf Hitler? Never heard of him'

Author Günter Grass in shock admission

by David Irving

Nobel prize-winning German penmeister Günter Grass yesterday revealed to a shocked literary world that he was unaware of the existence of Adolf Hitler until 1963 when he chanced upon a book chronicling the life of the talented Austrian watercolour artist. The claim comes hot on the heels of the author's admission that he'd been a member of the Waffen SS during World War II, although he only joined "for a bit of a laugh" and "never, ever, ever, gassed anybody".

Günter Grass and unnamed fellow soldier Smoking his trademark pipe, Grass told The Rockall Times: "I was young. I was bored. I wanted adventure. So I joined the Waffen SS, since they seemed to offer the best opportunities for foreign travel. Then I later forgot the whole thing, until I woke up one morning sixty years later and though: 'Crikey, I've just remembered that I once joined the Waffen SS.' The human mind is a strange thing, and no mistake."

Grass added: "I was in the Hitler Youth, too. I didn't have the foggiest who Hitler was — I just liked the uniform and the camping and the torchlit parades and stuff."

Taking a moment to refill his pipe, Grass recalled the first time he saw a bombed German city: "Corpses everywhere. Dead horses disembowelled in the streets. Smouldering rubble. Sobbing children. I remember thinking: 'What on earth could have caused such a catastrophe?' It was only forty years later that I learned the terrible truth: that the British had got really, really pissed off with Germany and had decimated dozens of towns and cities. Germans are still mystified as to the cause."

One expert in selective memory told us: "It's quite common for your Teutonics to forget what they did fifty, or sixty years ago. Austrian president Kurt Waldheim had to be reminded that he'd been in the SA-Reitercorps during the war. The poor bloke spent years thinking he'd been in Austria during 1942-3 when in fact he was quite possibly indulging in some light war crimes in Greece. It was a terrible shock."

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