Nobel laureate Guenter Grass said his literary achievements were being denigrated following his belated admission that he had served in the Waffen SS during World War Two. In an interview with ARD television ahead of the publication of his autobiography next month, the 78-year-old said his brief membership of the dreaded Waffen SS as a 17-year-old had influenced his life for the last six decades.“I didn’t do it and have to live with that,” Grass said when asked why he had not revealed his guilty secret sooner. Grass, world-famous for his first novel “The Tin Drum” published in 1959 and an icon of the German left, made the shock admission in a newspaper interview before the release of his autobiography “Peeling Onions.” Grass has come under withering attack from writers, literary critics, historians and politicians over his confession. For decades, Grass had urged Germans to come to terms with their Nazi past. Some have even called for Grass to be stripped of his Nobel literature prize, awarded in 1999. Former Poland president Lech Walesa demanded that Grass give up his honorary citizenship of Gdansk, the German’s birthplace.