It was not until 2006 that famous German writer Günter Grass, often viewed as a spokesman of "the nation's moral conscience", spoke publicly about the fact that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS (even though his involvement appears to have been less than criminal; he was conscripted into the Waffen-SS while barely seventeen years old and his duties were strictly military in nature). Statistically it is likely that there are many more Germans of Grass's generation (also called the "Flakhelfer-Generation") with biographies similar to his.