Yahoo! News is carrying a Reuters story today reporting that Günter Grass is getting a pat on the back from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem for his decision “to waive restrictions on his Nazi archives so the center could investigate his time in Hitler’s Waffen-SS.”

Apparently, Germany has very strict data protection laws, which would keep the details of Grass’s recently unshadied past on lockdown, but the center’s appeal last week for full access melted Grass’s heart.

According to the story, Efraim Zuroff, head of the Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement, “While access to archives will certainly make a historical investigation easier, documents by themselves will not deliver a clear picture of his war service.”

The center has found that “press reports on his past have been contradictory” and hope the author will speak out to set the record straight once and for all by “giv[ing] details about the unit or units he belonged to and about any operations and his role during this time,” according to Zuroff.

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