Nobel literature laureate Günter Grass, 78, has rejected calls in Poland for him to renounce his honoured-citizen status of Gdansk as a storm continued Wednesday over the writer's Waffen SS service. The revelation is a centrepiece of Grass's new book about his conversion from a keen Nazi teenager to a pacifist leftist. The publisher lifted a sales embargo on the book, Peeling the Onion, which had not been due to go on sale for another two weeks.

German newspapers printed images Wednesday of an official 1945 US document, signed by Grass, that confirms he was in the Waffen SS from November 1944. The war ended on May 8, 1945 and he was interned by US troops. Former Polish president Lech Walesa says the Polish city of Gdansk, known in its German period as Danzig, should strip Grass of his honoured status because of his association with the atrocity-ridden Nazi Party force.

'I see no reason to renounce this honour on my own,' Grass told Germany's ARD television in an interview to be aired Thursday evening. 'If the city of Gdansk were to decide so, I would accept the decision.' The storm over Grass has focused on why a writer who denounces Nazi-era holdovers in modern Germany and flays US presidents as warmongers has taken six decades to tell the truth about himself.

'I was called up into the Waffen SS. I was not involved in any crimes. I've always had the urge to one day describe all of this in its wider context,' he told the interviewer. 'In addition, I thought that what I had done as a writer, as a citizen of this country, which amounted to the very opposite of what shaped me in my youth in the Nazi era, had made up for it.' The book title, Peeling the Onion, refers to the author's exploration of the layers of self starting with a Nazi childhood.

Germany was rocked by the revelations last night that Günter Grass, its greatest living author and doyen of the Left, was a member of Hitler's elite Waffen-SS. The Nobel laureate, who has been the country's moral guide for decades, admitted in an interview published today that he became a member of the infamous Nazi corps at the age of 17.

The 78-year-old said he was driven by feelings of guilt to reveal the details of his "shameful" past in his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, due to be published next month. "It was weighing on my mind. My silence over all these years is one of the reasons why I decided to write this book. I forced myself to do it," he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. Asked why he was breaking his silence after more than 60 years, Grass said: "It had to come out finally." He added: "It will stain me forever."

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He did not give any details as to whether he knew whether his division, the 10th Tank Division Fundsberg was involved in any atrocities, but claimed that he never fired a single shot. He stressed his youthful naivety, and his desperation to get out of the corps because he found it gruelling. "It was very hard. It was all there was. The only question you asked was: 'How do I get out of it?' So I infected myself with jaundice, but that only helped for a few weeks. Then the grind began again and an inadequate training with ageing equipment. In any case, I had to write about it." He said his feelings of guilt developed only in later years. "It was always combined with the question: 'Could you not have realised at that point what was happening to you?'"

Grass, the author of dozens of plays and 11 novels, the most famous of which, The Tin Drum, is an examination of wartime Germany, has long been seen as the embodiment of the German zeitgeist. Throughout his career he has famously criticised those unwilling to deal with Germany's Nazi past.