however terrible the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff was-being the largest number of people being lost at sea in a single sinking ever-that the ship was carrying military personnel and weapons, making it a legitimate target for the Soviet submarine that sank it under international law (through it could argued that the sinking was morally wrong as the majority of the people aboard the ship were civilians), while the Stutthof death march was an act of genocide. Schmitt argued that through it was terrible the loss of life that resulted when the Wilhelm Gustloff went down, that the sinking of the ship was not an act of genocide and should not be remembered in that way. Grass was one of the "Flakhelfer generation", namely those Germans under the Third Reich who were too young to be drafted into the Wehrmacht, but were usually assigned as gunner assistants to the Luftwaffe anti-aircraft batteries that were used against the Allied bombers during the strategical bombing offensive. One critic of the novel, Fritz J. Raddatz, one of the leaders of the student protests of the late 1960s, stated in a 2006 interview that Grass was too harsh towards the "68ers" in Crabwalk, stating that Grass's portrayal of all their efforts to change German society as a failure was most unfair. Raddatz argued that the picture of the novel of the "68ers" as well meaning, but ineffectual intellectuals who cannot banish fascism because of their own considerable flaws was a distorted one, which reflected Grass's disapproval of the protest movements of the 1960s. Many reviewers felt that the "spectacular success" of Crabwalk would lead to a new national discourse that would place the image of Germans as victims of the war as the dominant memory of the past. The German journalist Ralph Giordano, who suffered persecution in the Nazi era for having a Jewish mother, called Crabwalk one of Grass's best novels, and wrote that Grass was correct that events such as the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff should be remembered and moaned as a terrible chapter of the war. However, Giordano insisted it should never be forgotten that it was the war began by Germany in 1939 that led to the expulsions of the Germans from Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, noting that the 1950 charter of the main expellee group was an "instrument perfectly suited for repressing historical facts" as it