Lech Walesa led the Solidarity strike in the Gdansk shipyards

The Nobel Prize-winning author shocked Germany on Saturday by admitting he had been in the notorious Nazi elite force.

Grass was born in 1927 in Gdansk, then known as Danzig. The city was also the birthplace of Mr Walesa's Solidarity movement, which undermined communism.

"The best thing would be for him to give up" the honour, Mr Walesa said.

"An uncomfortable situation has developed," he told the German newspaper Bild.

"I do not feel comfortable in that company. I do not know whether one should consider revoking the title. If it had been known he was in the SS, he would never have received the honour."

Mr Walesa is himself a Nobel peace laureate and honorary citizen of Gdansk.

War memoirs

Grass, a seasoned left-wing campaigner and pacifist, wrote the acclaimed anti-Nazi novel The Tin Drum.

The port city of Gdansk features prominently in Grass's novels

But he told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that he had been drafted at the age of 17 into an SS tank division and served in Dresden.

Previously it was only known he had served as a soldier and was wounded and taken prisoner by US forces.

Speaking before the publication of his war memoirs, Peeling Onions, he said his silence over the years had "weighed" upon him.

"My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote this book," he said. "It had to come out, finally."

Few details of the author's service were given other than that he had served in the Waffen SS Frundsberg Panzer Division after failing to get a posting in the submarine service.

The Waffen SS was the combat arm of Adolf Hitler's notorious elite force, which expanded to nearly one million members during the war.