You were fortunate to escape retribution at the time, and even more fortunate to have done so for 60 years. Why did you finally come clean? You say yourself: "It had to come out." But why? Were there incriminating documents? Had you confided in your family or friends? Was some young historian finally on your trail? Or did your conscience prompt you to come clean before you died — better late than never? I should like to think so.

But the absence of contrition — indeed, of any self-awareness beyond self-justification — in your interview excludes that possibility. I am afraid that the most cynical motive is also the most plausible: you had an autobiography to sell. The media spectacle, the national soul-searching that you must have known would be unleashed, had one overriding purpose: to make sure that your latest — very possibly your last — book would be a bestseller.

There is a studied vagueness about your references to your past, but about one thing you were quite clear: you were not personally responsible for the Nazi crimes. In your speech "Writing After Auschwitz", given 16 years ago, for instance, you recall the young poets of the 1950s: "All of us were aware, some clearly, some vaguely, that we belonged to the Auschwitz generation — not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals."

Even more tellingly, in a speech you gave before Israeli audiences in 1967, you stated: "You can tell by the date of my birth that I was too young to have been a Nazi but old enough to have been moulded by [the Nazi] system . . .  The man who is speaking to you, then, is neither a proven anti-fascist nor an ex-National Socialist, but rather the accidental product of a crop of young men who were either born too early or infected too late. Innocent through no merit of my own, I became part of a postwar period that was never to be a period of real peace."

How ingeniously you deflected the suspicions of your listeners, many of whom must have been Holocaust survivors, by disclaiming any pretence of opposition. You were merely innocent through no merit of your own. In what sense innocent? Too young to have been a Nazi party member, but not too young to have volunteered at age 15 to fight for Hitler's Reich!