ollaimh, if 100,000 people were interviewed, I assume the results are documented somewhere. Can you provide a pointer? If the interviews were conducted by your expert colleague, as you rather imply, it would have had to work six hours a day, seven days a week, for more than eleven years - assuming only 15 minutes per interview. A bit unlikely?

As for what alternatives were available to those who joined the SS, your theory takes no account of factors such as family and peer pressure, teenage hubris etc, which would certainly be relevant in the case of a 17-year-old recruit who was enlisted for only a few months. (Incidentally the Russian front had lost its significance by the time Grass signed on, and with Belsen already over-run, service in the concentration camps would have been a dubious option.)

I've always thought it safer to avoid criticising those who were caught up in the nazi phenomenon. Much as I dislike the present pope and everything he stands for, I have never made an issue of his enrolment in the Hitler Youth. So I am certainly not going to judge Grass. Hitler and the circumstances of post-Versailles Germany swept along many who would no doubt have been decent enough people had they been born into other circumstances. Those of us who were indeed born into other circumstances can only hope, but without knowing, that we would have been among the brave few who resisted.