GERMANY: Pope Benedict was an unwilling and unenthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, according to a new review of documents in the Bavarian Catholic Church archives.
A review of the archive - issued by the archdiocese of Munich and Freising ahead of the pope's visit home to Bavaria next month - lays plain the difficulties associated with staying out of the Nazi youth organisation for as long as possible.
In April 1939 Joseph Ratzinger followed his older brother Georg into St Michael's seminary in the Bavarian town of Traunstein.
The seminary was founded by bishops a decade earlier to encourage young men from less well-off local families to enter the priesthood. The seminarians attended the local school in the morning and spent their afternoons doing homework, taking sport and music lessons as well as religious instruction.
Local Nazi officials had little luck gaining control of the seminary they viewed as a "black borstal", but the Hitler Youth (HJ) had already gained a foothold at Traunstein's secondary school by 1934.
In that year, the education ministry pensioned off a religion teacher after six students complained in a letter that they felt discriminated against in his lessons because of their HJ membership. The noose tightened with the Hitler Youth Law of December 1935, ordering that "all German youth within the Reich" join the organisation.
The law does not appear to have had the desired effect: the archives show that a third of schoolchildren in Traunstein still had not joined the HJ by 1938. In November 1938, the education ministry decreed that only HJ members would be entitled to reductions in school fees, creating financial difficulties for poorer families.
In response, Bavarian bishops agreed to cover the financial shortfall for pupils from less well-off families, including the Ratzingers. The pressure increased in March 1939 with a new order reinforcing "obligatory youth service" for all, obliging 14-18-year-olds to join the HJ and 10-14-year-olds to join the "Deutsches Jungvolk".
By 1939, 93 per cent of ordinary pupils at Ratzinger's school were HJ members, though none of the seminarians joined, to the annoyance of loyal party members.
In the archive is a letter from 1939 complaining that the school was showing too much consideration for the seminarians at the expense of the "Hitler boys" and their "loyal, National Socialist parents".
The seminary adopted a passive approach and only in October 1939 did a letter arrive from the local HJ announcing a date for the sign-up of the seminarians. Joseph Ratzinger was not yet 14 at the time, but was finally signed up on April 16th, 1941.
The seminarians soon realised that HJ membership was a two-tier system: the March 1939 law created a "core HJ" and "obligatory HJ". As members of the latter group, the seminarians - and any others who joined only when forced - were still not entitled to reduced school fees.
It was possible to qualify for "core HJ" membership - and fee reductions - on approval after a year, but the seminarians were considered unsatisfactory HJ members by the authorities. "The forced [ HJ] service does not offer a guarantee that the pupils are really integrated into the National Socialist community," wrote an education ministry official.
Ratzinger said later that he attended as few HJ meetings as possible and never again after leaving the seminar.
In December 1945, after entering the clerical seminary in Freising, Ratzinger wrote to the director of St Michael's seminar that his experiences in the HJ and as a flak helper had given him "a chance to understand deeper the beauty and greatness of our profession thait would possible have been possible under normal circumstances".