He was forcwed to serve, I believe placed at an anti aircraft battery as a child. He escaped and returned to his anti-Hitler family. References to “being a member of the Hitler youth” without further explanation are more than misleading.
The Pope is being attacked for delivering what teh article calls a “message of peace” on the further ground that the Pope “sounded like a historian”.
These are not deserving of attack where I come from.
In the 1997 book Salt of the Earth, Ratzinger is asked whether he was ever in the Hitler Youth."At first we weren't," he says, speaking of himself and his older brother, "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 Hitler Youth. As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back. And that was difficult because the tuition reduction, which I really needed, was tied to proof of attendance at the Hitler Youth.
"Thank goodness there was a very understanding mathematics professor. He himself was a Nazi, but an honest man, and said to me, 'Just go once to get the document so we have it...' When he saw that I simply didn't want to, he said, 'I understand, I'll take care of it' and so I was able to stay free of it."
Ratzinger says this again in his own memoirs, printed in 1998. In his 2002 biography of the cardinal, John Allen, Jr. of the National Catholic Reporter wrote in detail about those events.
Ratzinger a Nazi? Don't believe it
The next attack will be that he didn't visit the suffering in Gaza.