The death today of novelist Günter Grass reminds us of the shame of the left. The German Nobel laureate spent most of his career as a moral scourge, preaching for peace, the environment, and all the good leftist causes. He was an opponent of the reunification of Germany into a single, free, anti-communist democracy. Only in 2006, in the course of promoting his memoir “Peeling the Onion,” did Grass confess that during World War II he’d been a member of the Waffen-SS.

It would be difficult to overstate how aghast this left the Europeans who had been invested in an honest reckoning. Our London leg at the time, Daniel Johnson, who had covered Germany for the Telegraph, wrote an open letter to Grass in two parts. In the first part, Johnson wrote of the Free German Chancellor Willy Brandt falling to his knees in 1970 on a visit to the Warsaw Ghetto, where Grass was at his side as a representative of German culture.

“Afterward, you wrote to thank Brandt effusively for the privilege of ‘being allowed to be moved,’” Mr. Johnson wrote to Grass. Mr. Johnson remarked on “the artificiality, not only of the language but also the emotion. For how could a man living a lie respond adequately on such an occasion?” In the second part, Mr. Johnson wrote that what made “most Germans feel betrayed is not the fact that you were a member of the Waffen SS, a criminal organization, but that you made the fateful decision not to share with anybody the most important single fact about yourself.”

After the pipe-puffing pontificating prevaricator finally confessed his membership in the Waffen-SS, the head of the Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Charlotte Knobloch, declared that Grass’s “long years of silence over his own SS past reduce his earlier statements to absurdities.” The comment was reported by the online Netzeitung newspaper and quoted in the Guardian. Ms. Knobloch has savvy; Grass later emerged as an opponent of Germany military aid to Israel. The Guardian also quoted Lech Walesa as having said that Grass should return his honorary Polish citizenship.

It’s not our purpose here to get on too high a horse. It is a great thing to be a novelist, and some of Grass’s earlier works are literary accomplishments. Nor is it our aim to tar all leftists with the brush of Grass. But there is this recurrent streak on the left that reminds us from time to time that the left itself, with its dirigiste conceptions, is not so far from the rightist tyrants. The real moral high road is the avenue of liberty, a story that Günter Grass managed to miss.