Although there is no suggestion that he was
involved in any atrocities, his service may be contrasted by opponents with
the attitude of John Paul II, who took part in anti-Nazi theatre
performances in his native Poland and in 1986 became the first pope to visit
Rome’s synagogue.
“John Paul was hugely appreciated for what he
did for and with the Jewish people,” said Lord Janner, head of the Holocaust
Education Trust, who is due to attend ceremonies today to mark the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
“If they were to appoint someone who was on
the other side in the war, he would start at a disadvantage, although it
wouldn’t mean in the long run he wouldn’t be equally understanding of the
concerns of the Jewish world.”
The son of a rural Bavarian police officer,
Ratzinger was six when Hitler came to power in 1933. His father, also called
Joseph, was an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in Hitler’s Brown Shirts
forced the family to move home several times.
In 1937 Ratzinger’s father retired and the
family moved to Traunstein, a staunchly Catholic town in Bavaria close to
the Führer’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. He joined the Hitler
Youth aged 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941.
He quickly won a dispensation on
account of his training at a seminary. “Ratzinger was only briefly a
member of the Hitler Youth and not an enthusiastic one,” concluded John
Allen, his biographer.
Two years later Ratzinger was enrolled in an
anti-aircraft unit that protected a BMW factory making aircraft
engines. The workforce included slaves from Dachau concentration
camp.
Ratzinger has insisted he never took part in
combat or fired a shot — adding that his gun was not even loaded — because
of a badly infected finger. He was sent to Hungary, where he set up tank
traps and saw Jews being herded to death camps. He deserted in April 1944
and spent a few weeks in a prisoner of war camp.
He has since said that although he was
opposed to the Nazi regime, any open resistance would have been futile —
comments echoed this weekend by his elder brother Georg, a retired priest
ordained along with the cardinal in 1951.
“Resistance was truly impossible,” Georg
Ratzinger said. “Before we were conscripted, one of our teachers said we
should fight and become heroic Nazis and another told us not to worry as
only one soldier in a thousand was killed. But neither of us ever used a
rifle against the enemy.”
Some locals in Traunstein, like Elizabeth
Lohner, 84, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious
objector, dismiss such suggestions. “It was possible to resist, and those
people set an example for others,” she said. “The Ratzingers were young and
had made a different choice.”
In 1937 another family a few hundred yards
away in Traunstein hid Hans Braxenthaler, a local resistance fighter. SS
troops repeatedly searched homes in the area looking for the fugitive and
his fellow conspirators.
“When he was betrayed and the Nazis came for
him, Braxenthaler shot himself because he knew he couldn’t escape,” said
Frieda Meyer, 82, Ratzinger’s neighbour and childhood friend. “Even though
they had tortured him in Dachau concentration camp he refused to give up his
resistance efforts.”
Despite question marks over Ratzinger’s
wartime conduct, the main obstacle to his prospects in the conclave — the
assembly of cardinals to elect the new pope — is the conservative stance he
has adopted as guardian of Catholic orthodoxy since John Paul named him to
head the congregation for the doctrine of the faith in 1981.
His condemnations are legion — of women
priests, married priests, dissident theologians and homosexuals, whom he has
declared to be suffering from an “objective disorder”.
He upset many Jews with a statement in 1987
that Jewish history and scripture reach fulfilment only in Christ — a
position denounced by critics as “theological anti-semitism”. He made more
enemies among other religions in 2000, when he signed a document, Dominus
Jesus, in which he argued: “Only in the Catholic church is there eternal
salvation”.
Some of his staunchest critics are in Germany.
A recent poll in Der Spiegel, the news magazine, showed opponents of a
Ratzinger papacy outnumbered supporters by 36% to 29%.
As one western cardinal who was in two minds
about him put it: “He would probably be a great pope, but I have no idea how
I would explain his election back home.”
One liberal theologian,when asked what he
thought of a Ratzinger papacy, was more direct: “It fills me with horror.”
