Was the Pope in the HJ?

Kyt · May 13, 2009

You may have seen the news.

Hitler Youth past is denied by Pope on trip hit by row over Holocaust - Times Online

The wartime past of Pope Benedict XVI threatened to overwhelm his peace mission to the Holy Land as the Vatican issued a denial that the pontiff had served in the Hitler Youth.

“The Pope has said he never, never was a member of the Hitler Youth, which was a movement of fanatical volunteers,*” Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said — contradicting statements the Pope has himself made about his involvement with the group. The Vatican denial came as Benedict’s trip sank deeper in controversy and recrimination, eclipsing the message of peace and reconciliation he has been pushing during his pilgrimage

Mr Lombardi said the Pope, as Joseph Ratzinger, a 16-year-old seminarian, served in an auxiliary air defence squadron “that had nothing to do with Nazism or Nazi ideolog**y”. Venting frustration with the relentless focus on the Pope’s war years — a highly sensitive subject on a visit to the Jewish state — Mr Lombardi insisted that the Pope “never was in this movement of young people ideologically linked to Nazism”. The spokesman said that he felt compelled to respond “to the lies written by the media here and internationally”.

However, in a series of interviews in the 1996 book Salt of the Earth, the Pope, then still a cardinal, said that he had been drafted into the Hitler Youth, like so many other young Germans.

“When the compulsory Hitler Youth was introduced in 1941, my brother was obliged to join***. I was still too young but later, as a seminarian, I was registered in the HY. As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back,” he said at the time.

The questions hanging over the wartime service of the Catholic leader have soured his visit to Israel, where Holocaust survivors still bear the tattoos and memories of the Nazi death camps and some have expressed unease at having the German Pope visit.

Many Israelis thought that the Pope’s visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial commemorating the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, lacked the necessary remorse expected from a German with his background.

“All that was asked of you was to say a short, authoritative and moving sentence. All you had to do was to express regret. That’s all we wanted to hear,” the daily Yediot Aharonot said. “After all, it is claimed that you appointed to your Church a priest who denies the Holocaust and as a boy, you were a member of the Hitler Youth.”

The controversy has deepened after the Pope reinstated a British-born bishop who denied the extent of the Holocaust, causing outrage in Israel. The Vatican also asked that the pontiff be allowed to sidestep a Yad Vashem exhibit criticising his wartime predecessor, Pius XII, for allegedly ignoring the plight of Europe’s Jews. The Vatican denies that interpretation of history and is working to declare Pius XII a saint.

While the Pope has insisted that his pilgrimage is non-political, he has been increasingly sucked into the conflict that has mired the region for decades. The pontiff walked out of an interfaith meeting in Jerusalem after a Palestinian cleric called on him to help to stop Israeli “crimes”.

But on a visit to the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine standing on the ruins of the destroyed Jewish temple, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Hussein, also urged his visitor to work to end Israeli “aggression” against Palestinians.

“We look forward for your holiness’s effective role in putting an end to the ongoing aggression against our people, our land and our holy sites in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank,” he said.

The Pope is due to visit a Palestinian refugee camp today, heralding yet more controversy.
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* Considering HJ membership was compulsory this denial seems to be quite a revision of history.....but what's new?

** an interesting historical interpretation - especially as these units were part and parcel of the whole system

*** actually HJ membership was made compulsory before the beginning of the war

and an article in 2005

The New York Times > AP > International > New Pope Defied Nazis As Teen During WWII

Blinds drawn, windows closed, Joseph Ratzinger huddled with his father and older brother around a radio and listened to Allied radio broadcasts, volume on low.

It was a small and risky act of defiance in this conservative Bavarian village deep inside Adolf Hitler's Germany. But the father wanted his sons to know the truth about the Nazis and World War II, says Georg Ratzinger, who like his brother drew strength from the Catholic Church.

''It was strictly forbidden. Anyone who was caught would be sent to the concentration camps, so we did it secretively,'' Georg Ratzinger told The Associated Press. ''The German news was not true and he wanted to hear from the foreign services what was really happening.''

The clandestine sessions were just one of the passive acts of resistance, evasions and escapes by the future Pope Benedict XVI, whose choices then -- enrolling in the Hitler Youth as required and the Army when drafted as he approached age 18 -- allowed him to survive.

People who knew the Ratzingers said they were never willingly part of the Nazi machine.

Frieda Jochner, 79, who grew up in their old neighborhood and speaks with a thick, warm Bavarian accent, remembered the ''Ratzinger boys'' as pious and serious -- Georg as the ''Bavarian one'' -- a friendly joker -- and the studious Joseph as the more shy of the two.

She said Joseph Ratzinger was so involved in his studies at the Catholic seminary that even if he had wanted to be active in the Hitler Youth, he never would have had the time.

''He was very industrious,'' she said, taking a break decorating the Ratzingers' childhood home with wreaths, pine boughs and ribbons.

Renate Augerer, 75, remembered the brothers from the town's school, where they were both known as being serious, scholarly, pious and kind -- two Catholic priests in the making.

''He was very certainly not for Hitler,'' Augerer said of Joseph Ratzinger. ''Absolutely not. They couldn't do anything about it. ... You can't forget the times.''

Max Fiedler, 77, said he also was compelled to join the Hitler Youth when the Nazis took over the Catholic youth group he was in and merged it into their organization.

''It was automatic,'' said Fiedler, who had joined Augerer at a reception in the small Traunstein town hall following a Mass in Ratzinger's honor last week.

Some 80 to 90 percent of Germans joined the Hitler Youth and refusing to sign up could mean being sent to a youth ''reeducation camp,'' akin to a concentration camp, said Volker Dahm, director of Nazi-era research for Munich's Institute for Contemporary History.

''You could try to avoid it but it was very, very difficult,'' Dahm said. ''It was a bit easier to avoid it if you lived in a big city where you could hide yourself in the crowd, but in the countryside it was nearly impossible because everyone knew you.''

Pope John Paul II had covertly resisted the Nazis in occupied Poland, helping form an underground theater and enrolling in a clandestine seminary run by the archbishop of Krakow.

In Germany, opportunities for outright defiance were limited -- and dangerous. Those who did resist met horrible fates, such as two famous student leaders in Munich, Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were caught distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in 1942 and executed by guillotine.

Pope Benedict, 78, has not tried to hide his enrollment in the Hitler Youth at age 14, addressing his brief membership in his autobiography, ''Salt of the Earth.''

''We weren't in it to start with, but with the beginning of the obligatory Hitler Youth in 1941 my brother was enrolled as was required,'' he recalled. ''I was too young but later was enrolled into it from the seminary.''

Benedict implies it was the school that did the enrolling, but he doesn't make it clear.

He said he tried to avoid Hitler Youth meetings, creating a dilemma. He needed proof of attendance to get a tuition discount, which his father -- a retired policeman -- badly needed. So he finessed it, according to his book.

''Thank God, there was a math teacher who understood. He was himself a Nazi party member, but an honest man who told me, 'Just go so we have it,''' he recalled. ''But when he saw that I simply didn't want to, he said: 'I understand, I'll take care of it.' And so I was free of it.''

With so little active resistance to the Nazis, small gestures of defiance were telling, said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial in Berlin.

''The color of resistance is not black and white, it's a scale of gray,'' Tuchel said. ''It was not a single decision, not a single choice -- you don't just say one day 'I resist.'

''Every day you had to decide if you were going to go with the Nazi system or step aside. To resist is a long-term decision,'' he added.

The Ratzingers moved to Traunstein in 1937. The father was anti-Nazi and had to move from the town of Tittmoning to Auschau in 1932 after clashing with local Nazi party supporters.

In Traunstein, resistance came largely from communists, though there were never many in the town of about 12,000 and most were arrested and shipped to the Dachau concentration camp in the early 1930s. Though most were later released, they lived in fear of being returned to the camps, according to Traunstein historian Friedbert Muehldorfer.

Being sent to a concentration camp for not joining the Hitler Youth would have been an ''extreme'' punishment, but ''it was very difficult for youth who didn't join, and they could be ostracized,'' Muehldorfer said. ''It doesn't mean they were enthusiastic about the Nazis.''

The Nazis enjoyed general support in Traunstein, though it was tempered by the conservative Roman Catholicism typical of Bavaria. People were disgruntled with the Nazis' anti-church attitudes and practices such as removing crosses from school classrooms, Muehldorfer said.

The town had only a few Jewish families, largely driven out before the war began in 1939.

In 1943, at age 16, Joseph Ratzinger was called up along with his entire seminary class to work as a helper for anti-aircraft batteries, which defended a BMW plant and later an aircraft factory at Oberpfaffenhofen, where the first German jet fighters were produced.

In 1944, he was forced into the country's compulsory civil service and sent to dig anti-tank ditches on the Austrian-Hungarian border.

He recounts his work group being awakened in the middle of the night and pressured to join the Waffen SS, the combat units of the Nazi Party's elite guard. ''An SS officer had each one come forward and tried, by parading each one in front of the group, to force 'volunteer' enlistments,'' he wrote in another autobiographical book, ''Memoirs 1927-1977.''

Some signed up in ''this criminal group. I had the luck to be able to say that I had the intent to become a Catholic priest. We were sent away with scorn and insults.''

He was drafted into the Army in December 1944 and stationed near Traunstein. With the German army collapsing and the end of the war just days away, he deserted in April or May of 1945 -- he said he can't remember the exact date. He knew he could be killed by SS fanatics, who continued to shoot or hang soldiers found out of uniform up until the end of the war.

Sneaking home by a roundabout way, he was stopped by two soldiers as he emerged from under a train overpass. ''For a moment, the situation was extremely critical for me,'' he remembered. But the soldiers ''were ones who, thank God, had had enough of war'' and let him go, treating him as wounded because he had his arm in a sling.

Tuchel, the director of the German Resistance Memorial in Berlin, said that even in wartime Germany young men like Ratzinger could find quiet ways to defy authority.

''There is always a choice. You have to go into the Hitler Youth, but then it is your decision if you are going to be an active member,'' Tuchel said. ''You have to go into the labor service, but it's your decision if you're very active. ... You had no choice to go into the army, but it is your decision how long you stay.''

Because Benedict acknowledged his past and because of the circumstances of his involvement, most people, including Jewish groups in Germany and Israel, have been understanding.

''He was a very young person when this happened, it was hardly a matter of choice, and what counts is what he's done in the last 30 years in Jewish-Catholic dialogue,'' said Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee's Berlin office.

At the right time, she suggested, the pope may share more of his past.

''We do have someone who has memories of the time, who certainly participated ... on the side of people who were perpetrating mass crimes. So I think the appropriate thing is that at the appropriate moment he is reflective about this personal biography -- it will mean a lot in the Jewish world.''

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem doesn't see a need for further investigation of Ratzinger's Hitler Youth membership, said spokeswoman Estee Yaari.

Ephraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, said there two ways of dealing with the issue.

''One way is delving into the subject and emphasizing it. The other is by doing positive things to improve Jewish-Christian relations and German-Jewish relations without necessarily emphasizing his own personal experiences or his past,'' Zuroff said. ''My impression is that he's chosen the latter path.''
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Antipodean Andy · May 14, 2009

By golly he was busy!

Pope was 'never in Hitler Youth' - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The official Vatican spokesman has said that German-born Pope Benedict was never a member of the Hitler Youth, contradicting quotes from the pontiff that have been aired again during his visit to Israel.

Reverend Federico Lombardi said the Pope, whose speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial on Monday (local time) was criticised in Israel as too abstract, was a member of anti-aircraft units that many youths were drafted into in the last two years of World War II.

But noting that many media reports during the Pope's Middle East tour had mentioned membership in the Nazi Party's youth wing, Rev. Lombardi told reporters in Jerusalem: "The Pope was never in the Hitler Youth, never, never, never."

In Salt Of The Earth, a 1996 book of autobiographical and religious reflections based on interviews with German journalist Peter Seewald, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said, however, that he was automatically enrolled into the Hitler Youth.

Asked if he had been a member, he said: "At first we weren't, but when the compulsory Hitler Youth was introduced in 1941, my brother was obliged to join.

"I was still too young, but later, as a seminarian, I was registered in the HY. As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back."

He also said he served on anti-aircraft batteries and was conscripted into the German infantry late in the war.

Rev. Lombardi did not say why the Vatican had not issued a denial about membership in the Hitler Youth in the past.

Media reports highlighted this issue even before Benedict was elected in 2005, and it regularly appears in articles about him.

The speaker of Israel's parliament, in criticism of the Pope's Yad Vashem speech, described him as a "German who joined the Hitler Youth and ... a person who joined Hitler's army".

The Vatican spokesman made a distinction between convinced Hitler Youth activists and members of the anti-aircraft units, omitting the category of involuntary Hitler Youth members to which Benedict has been quoted as saying he belonged.

"The Hitler Youth was a corps of volunteers, fanatically, ideologically for the Nazis," Rev. Lombardi said.

The anti-aircraft auxiliary corps the Pope was enrolled in towards the end of the war "had absolutely nothing to do with the Hitler Youth and the Nazis and Nazi ideology", he added.

"It is important to say what is true and not to say false things about a very sensitive thing like this," Rev. Lombardi said.

Histories of the air-aircraft auxiliary corps, known as the Flakhelfer, and of the Hitler Youth, describe the auxiliaries as being organised as a unit of the Hitler Youth.
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Was the Pope in the HJ?

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