Mere hours after it was announced that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the new Pope Benedict XVI, the media was generating controversy over his wartime past. Specifically, many news outlets, particularly the news channel networks, were raising the specter of Ratzinger's World War II involvement with the Hitler Youth and the German Army. However, the media is generating false controversy and engaging in another example in a long line of irresponsible reporting. Ratzinger's participation in the Hitler Youth and the German Army was both compulsory and proof that German youth were also victims of Hitler's madness.
Ratzinger was never a member of the Nazi Party. Ratzinger was briefly a member of the Hitler Youth. Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth in 1941 because it was mandatory for all German males aged 14 and older to do so. An exemption was granted when Ratzinger enrolled in a seminary.
Joseph Ratzinger's career in the German Army is anti-climactic at best. Conscripted into the anti-aircraft corps at the age of 16 in 1943, Ratzinger's Flak battery never fired a shot at Allied bombers. Ratzinger was later drafted into the German Army, along with all other German males his age, and trained as an infantryman. Ratzinger never saw frontline duty against the Allies or the Soviets due to a medical condition. In April 1945, Ratzinger deserted and returned home to Bavaria where he was captured by the U.S. Army and interned in a POW camp. Ratzinger was released in June 1945.
Ratzinger's wartime experiences suggest that not all of Hitler's victims were non-Germans. The brainwashing of German youth may well be one of the more odious aspects of the Third Reich. Some have criticized Ratzinger for participating at all in the Hitler Youth and German Armed forces. However, what many critics fail to realize is that resistance against the Nazi regime meant death.
Many critics see his failure to openly refuse joining the Hitler Jugend or the German Army as proof of his complicity in the horrors of the Third Reich. Such thinking is deeply flawed as it asks of a teenager to make an impossible choice. The Gestapo was not above torturing and killing young Germans.
Ratzinger's wartime record is so innocuous as to be dismissed by even the most avid Nazi hunters. In an Associated Press interview, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, stated that he is not concerned with Ratzinger's war record and points out that in no way was Ratzinger implicated in any war crime. Zuroff is more concerned with the continuing rapprochement between the Holy See and Israel.
By making issue of Ratzinger's wartime past, mass media outlets are continuing to behave irresponsibly by creating controversy where none should exist. Rather than creating stories, media outlets should concentrate on substantive issues that affect our world: such as whether Benedict will support further reconciliation toward Israel or continue the Vatican's policy of confronting tyranny as John Paul II did when he helped bring down the Iron Curtain. Rather than inaugurating a media circus over Ratzinger's war-record, the media should judge Pope Benedict XVI by his actions as pontiff, not as a teenager.
Jake Creecy is a first-year law student.
This viewpoint appeared in The Marquette Tribune on May 2 2005.