Pretty interesting article with more information about the Pope's history as a youth and the whole Nazi party thing...

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Pope's family saw Hitler as enemy

After 81 years, Rev. Georg Ratzinger thought he had lived through as much as a man could in a lifetime. He never imagined a turn of wonder: his brother, Joseph, becoming pope.

"More than 450 years, there's never been a German pope. And to think it is someone from our family," the older of the two Ratzinger brothers said Friday as he bustled about his apartment in this medieval city preparing for a trip to Rome for the inauguration mass.

For much of last week, Georg Ratzinger was at the center of a storm in Germany. First he maneuvered a media frenzy. Then he did his part to keep the record straight on the life and times of Pope Benedict XVI--and to prevent the tabloid press from dredging up World War II.

The new pope, a conservative theologian and former dean of cardinals at the Vatican, was described as "God's Rottweiler" so often in print that Georg Ratzinger felt a tug of protectiveness.

And when the Sun newspaper in Britain, the country's most popular tabloid, raised questions about the future pope's war years with a screaming headline: "From Hitler Youth to . . . Papa Ratzi," Georg Ratzinger patiently opened his doors to recount their lives as a lesson in understanding.

In a half-hour conversation, the courtly one-time choir director blurted out a one-word criticism of certain media accounts.

"Rubbish," Ratzinger said, rubbing his forehead.

Family despised Hitler

Joseph Ratzinger, 78, has written about his childhood during the rise of Adolf Hitler. He always acknowledged that in 1941, when the Nazis demanded membership, he joined a Hitler Youth group. Georg Ratzinger explained that he and Joseph, who realized early on that they wanted "a life at the altar," were raised in a home where Hitler was despised, in the pine-covered hills of Bavaria.

"My parents viewed him intensely as an enemy," Ratzinger said. "From the beginning, they saw him as an enemy. They thought he was anti-Catholic and anti-Christian, anti-religion." Their father was a police officer whose dislike of the policies of National Socialism spurred the family to move from village to village in southeast Germany. The family eventually settled in Traunstein, a Catholic stronghold near Munich.

On Nov. 9, 1938--Kristallnacht--Jews in Traunstein were attacked and driven from town. Anyone who challenged Nazi authority was intimidated and threatened. Dachau, a concentration camp, was a few miles outside Munich.

In the world that changed before their eyes, young people were drawn to Nazi youth groups, which were often the only source of recreation in rural Bavaria, Georg Ratzinger said. Many children were attracted by sports and music into joining the organizations.

That social element never appealed to his brother, Georg said. Joseph Ratzinger was a bookish boy who shied away from sports.

Later, both were taken into military service, first as youth guards, then soldiers. Neither of them, Ratzinger said, could see how to escape the times.

"He had no choice. You had to join or you were shot. It was a brutal regime. It was an inhuman dictatorship," Ratzinger said. "There was nothing good in it."

Neither Ratzinger fired a shot in the war, Georg said.

"I was a radio operator," he said, and young Joseph "didn't fight at all." His brother went from one unit to another as a guard known as a luftwaffenhelfer, "a helper to the air force." He maintained cannons, bullets, guns and other supplies.

`It was tough times'

The younger Ratzinger was drafted into a forced labor unit and then the army in 1944. He deserted the army within months and then, like his brother, was held for weeks by victorious American troops as a prisoner of war.

"It was tough times," Ratzinger said.

The flurry of interest in the new pope's war history has touched a nerve in Germany, particularly in a year that marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. Franz Haselbeck, a longtime archivist for Traunstein, said some news stories seemed to ignore the reality of what a 14-year-old boy faced in Nazi Germany.

"Traunstein was like all other cities here at the time, not more and not less involved with the Nazi party," Haselbeck said. "You had such repression that you couldn't lead a normal life. No one could. I don't see how any normal boy could stand against it.

"To make something of this now--when [Joseph Ratzinger] wrote about it himself years ago--really, it seems ridiculous," he added.

Pope defended as a survivor

Abraham Foxman, U.S. director of the Anti-Defamation League, said he is, in one sense, heartened to see that questions are being raised about "the terrible memories of the Nazi era." But Pope Benedict XVI is a survivor of tyranny, Foxman said, and he should be valued as a man who saw the worst of humankind and spent the rest of his life pursuing something much better.

"The fact is he grew up in those times, and then this is how he chose to spend the rest of his life," Foxman said. "I think each one of us ponders: What if we grew up then? What would we have done? . . . Measure those years against the other 50 or 60 years of his life and make the judgment."

Georg Ratzinger has allowed himself a few judgments this past news-filled week.

"Anybody who writes such a thing must need something to write," Ratzinger said, sighing about the most sensational headlines. "And anyone who writes that . . . doesn't understand the times as they were."