Joey Ratz!

“True, the Pope was in the Hitler Youth, but you have to understand that back then, if you weren’t in the Hitler Youth, it was much more difficult to harm Jews.”

I would like to know what authenticated written record exists (a diary like Anne Frank’s would be nice, but I’m not counting on one existing) of his activities around the time he was in the Hitler Youth, which according to the Yahoo article was in the early 1940s. I don’t mean his father’s statements and writings, I mean Ratzinger’s, in his own words (as others would recall them) and writings. He was born in 1927, so in 1940 he would have been what…13?

The Yahoo article Jake linked to above goes on to say he was reportedly conscripted to serve in an anti-aircraft unit guarding a BMW plant in 1943, when he would have been 16. It’s possible that he lived a moral life, as he father was supposed to have lived, according to what is likely an inevitably self-serving and edited version of his life story, as he gave in a book published in 1996 called “Salz der Erde” (Salt of the Earth). I’m trying to get a copy, and I’ll try also to resist the urge to spin it as positively from a perspective of a person of faith as I was the election of Bush last November.

Again, I want references…footnotes…something authentic, verifiable, essentially scientific. I know we can’t change history, and people who try to interpret it in critical or radical ways are vulnerable to being accused of revisionism. To avoid that charge, what do you think are the chances that the new pope (or at least his young followers), with today’s open-source, client-centric, creatively communal technology might choose to “blog” their diaries in the future?

I’m trying to not be sarcastic. Really.

Anyway, given that there really were few alternatives to resist the Nazis during WWII within Germany, especially as a child, his activities and membership in the Hitler Youth might have been for what options were open to him (and his family) as moral as if he had joined the Boy Scouts.

On the bright side, I think it could likely be said that he’s about as likely to support war and capital punishment as he is to support overtly fascist ideology, but I’d also expect — and I think we’re seeing — that his background also leads logically to him supporting draconian policies against not only abortion rights but also contraception rights for young, poor, and unmarried women.

I think that Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, has a very well developed conscience, laid down in his early teens as he grew up in Nazi Germany, but it’s very likely that his upbringing has also given him little appreciation for the good that strong central policies for economic welfare/justice and support for nondirective, comprehensive reproductive health care services through regulated PUBLIC health care services. And I want to stress PUBLIC, because while contraception and abortion was certainly available through private (and uncertain, if not outright criminal and dangerous) means — Anais Nin and her cohorts, or whoever may still be living today, could attest to that – but even in Nazi Germany, the state certainly absolutely did not sanction it as an option for women in general, especially young, poor, unmarried women.

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