The truth that now emerges, Mr Grass, is that you were one of the last-ditch defenders of the Third Reich. You were a soldier in the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. Let us be clear: the Waffen SS did not run the death camps, but its troops — some 900,000 of them by the end —were deeply implicated in the Holocaust and responsible for many of the worst atrocities of the war.

We await with interest your account of your own part in these war crimes, but your memoirs will be treated by historians with suspicion, as no more reliable than those of other SS men — Adolf Eichmann's, for instance, which he wrote while awaiting his trial and execution.

No doubt the comparison shocks you. But Eichmann, like you, was an imposter. He, too, reinvented himself after the war rather than face up to his past. True: he was a senior officer, responsible for rounding up millions of Jews to be sent to death camps, while you were a young soldier. But you both tried to exculpate yourselves by pleading that you were only obeying orders.

The most striking difference is that he was found out 45 years ago, and paid for his crimes with his life. You got away with it.

What we do know is that your panzer division saw action on both the Eastern and Western fronts in 1944-45, notably during the Allied airborne landings at Arnhem. Your bitter, bloody and ruthless resistance there and elsewhere postponed Germany's inevitable defeat. While you were making your heroic last stand, Jews and other helpless "enemies of the Reich" were still being murdered in the camps and, later, on the death marches — thousands of them every day.