quote:
Ratzinger was a member of Hitler's Youth Group. He needs to apologize and admit his mistakes to the Jewish people before he moves on. His involvement with the Hitler and the Nazis is simply unexcusable in my mind.
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ReutersNew pope served in Hitler Youth but was not a Nazi Wed April 20, 2005 1:25 AM GMT+05:30
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Joseph Ratzinger, elected Roman Catholic pope on Tuesday, served in the Hitler Youth during World War Two when membership was compulsory, according to his autobiography.
But he was never a member of the Nazi party and his family opposed Adolf Hitler's regime, biographers have said.
Ratzinger's experiences during World War Two have been a source of controversy in some newspapers which probed the German pope's past after Pope John Paul died and he quickly became a frontrunner to succeed the deceased pontiff.
In his autobiography "Milestone: Memoirs: 1927-1977", Ratzinger said he and his brother Georg were both enrolled in the Hitler Youth when membership was obligatory.
Founded in 1922 and based in Ratzinger's native region of Bavaria, the Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organisation of the Nazi Party. It was disbanded in 1923 but re-established in 1926, a year after the Nazi Party was recognised.
Members of the Hitler Youth wore uniforms resembling those of the Nazi Party.
"Neither Ratzinger nor any member of his family was a National Socialist," John Allen wrote in a biography of Ratzinger entitled "Cardinal Ratzinger: The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith".
Allen quoted Ratzinger, who was born in 1927, as saying his father's criticism of the Nazis forced the family to move home four times.
"As a seminarian, he was briefly enrolled in the Hitler Youth in the early 1940s, though he was never a member of the Nazi party," Allen, a Vatican specialist, wrote in an article published in National Catholic Reporter in 1999.
"In 1943 he was conscripted into an anti-aircraft unit guarding a BMW plant outside Munich," wrote Allen.
U.S. POW
Allen said Ratzinger was later sent to Austria's border with Hungary to erect tank traps. "After being shipped back to Bavaria, he deserted. When the war ended, he was an American prisoner of war," he said.
Allen said that under Hitler, "Ratzinger says he watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth. Their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them."
Peter Seewald, a German journalist who published a book-length interview with Ratzinger in 1996 entitled "Salt of the Earth", said the German "clearly saw Hitler and the Third Reich as the enemy" to both family and Church.
Ratzinger's father "saw that a victory of Hitler would not be a victory for Germany but a victory of the Antichrist," Seewald's U.S. publisher, Ignatius Press, wrote in a summary of Seewald's book.
"In 1943 while still in seminary, he was drafted at age 16 into the German anti-aircraft corps," Ignatius said. "Though he was opposed to the Nazis, he was forced to join at a young age."
Ratzinger trained in the German infantry but a subsequent illness kept him from doing "the usual rigours of military duty", Ignatius said.
"As the Allied front drew closer to his post in 1945, he escaped from the Nazis and returned to his family's home in Traunstein, just as American troops established their headquarters in the Ratzinger household," Ignatius said.
It said he was put in a U.S. prisoner of war camp but released a few months later at the end of the war in 1945.
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