Or perhaps you heard the great opera singer, the late Elizabeth Schwarzkopf? She kept her Nazi activities quiet until after she retired, and she took to the grave the secret of which senior Nazi's casting couch launched her career.

But the most celebrated case was, of course, Kurt Waldheim. As a staff officer in the Balkans he was a small cog in the Nazi war machine that was committing terrible crimes there — and yet as UN Secretary General he conveniently omitted to mention any details about his wartime record.

Waldheim's silence changed the history of Austria, for better and worse. But the curious thing was — as I discovered when I interviewed him in the Hofburg Palace — that he refused to believe that he had done anything wrong. He never apologised, never explained. Nor, by the way, have you.

Despite this, it must be difficult for you to see anything in common between Waldheim's case and your own. What has an ambitious bureaucrat, an unscrupulous mediocrity like him to do with a great writer like you? Let me tell you: Waldheim was a classic example of a phenomenon, which Nazi Germany created and for which the German language promptly created the perfect expression: der Schreibtischtäter, the "desk criminal".

You relished using that neologism back in the 1960s, denouncing the conservative government of Konrad Adenauer for its Atlanticism, its Cold War rhetoric, its eagerness to rearm and join Nato, because Adenauer, though his own record was impeccable — he had been sacked as Mayor of Cologne and later imprisoned by the Nazis — did not scruple to promote former Nazis whom he found useful.