LISBON, Feb 16: German writer and Nobel winner Gunther Grass compared the anti-Islam cartoons to Nazi caricatures of Jews, in an interview published in Portugal on Thursday.

“I recommend that everyone have a look at the drawings: they remind one of those published in a famous German newspaper during the time of the Nazis, Der Stuermer,” he told the weekly news magazine Visao.

“It published anti-Semitic caricatures of the same style.”

Der Stuermer was a Nazi newspaper which appeared from 1923 to the end of World War II in 1945 and was strongly anti-Semitic.

Its publisher, Julius Streicher, was executed after the Nurember war crimes trial.

Grass, whose works include ‘The Tin Drum’ and ‘Cat and Mouse’, was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1999. His works have a strongly political dimension.

He accused the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of deliberate provocation — ‘they are right-wing radicals and xenophobes’, he said — by publishing the cartoons last September despite being warned they would be offensive.

The newspaper’s culture editor, Flemming Rose, has defended the decision to publish, arguing the drawings were no different to those it has printed in the past satirising Jesus Christ, the Danish royal family or politicians. —AFP