VATICAN CITY - Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (b. 1927) of Germany, a longtime guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy, was elected the new pope Tuesday evening in the first conclave of the new millennium. He chose the name Pope Benedict XVI.
Ratzinger, the first German pope in centuries, served John Paul II since 1981 as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In that position, he has disciplined church dissidents and upheld church policy against attempts by liberals for reforms. He turned 78 on Saturday.
By the way: And he is also, if I am not mistaken, a German World War 2 Veteran! God sometimes really works in myterious ways.
US PGA Commentator - "One of the reasons Arnie (Arnold Palmer) is playing so well is that, before each tee shot, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them .... Oh my god!!!!! What have I just said?!!!"
Joseph Ratzinger was born in Marktl am Inn, in Bavaria, the son of a police officer who was staunchly anti-Nazi. In 1937 Ratzinger's father retired and settled in the town of Traunstein. When Ratzinger turned 14 in 1941, he was required by law to join the Hitler Youth , but according to his biographer John Allen he was not an enthusiastic member. In 1943, at the age of 16 he was, along with the rest of his class, drafted into the Flak or anti-aircraft corps, responsible for the guarding of a BMW plant outside Munich. He was then sent for basic infantry training and was posted to Hungary, where he worked setting up anti-tank defences until he deserted in April 1944 (an offence punishable by death). In 1945 he was briefly held in an Allied POW camp.
Thank you for first short biography of him during World War II, watchdog! I didn't know he was posted to Hungary during the war. From what I have understood he deserted from the German Army (Hitlerjugend) in Germany, but I need to check this up again. These newspapers and TVs today... each one tells you a different story.
US PGA Commentator - "One of the reasons Arnie (Arnold Palmer) is playing so well is that, before each tee shot, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them .... Oh my god!!!!! What have I just said?!!!"
Some more interesting facts about Benedict XV. I didn't know it was he who established the famous bureau of communication for prisoners of war!
Pope Benedict XV.
[arms of Pope Benedict XV] (Giacomo della Chiesa) (1914-1922) Born Pegli, Italy, 1854; died Rome, Italy. Nuncio to Spain, privy chamberlain, Archbishop of Bologna, and cardinal, he was elected directly after the outbreak of the World War, and maintained a position of neutrality throughout. He sent a representative to each country to work for peace, and in 1917 delivered the Plea for Peace, which demanded a cessation of hostilities, a reduction of armaments, a guaranteed freedom of the seas, and international arbitration. President Wilson was the only ruler who answered him, declaring peace impossible, though he afterwards adopted most of Benedict's proposals for establishing peace. At the close of the war France and Spain resumed diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and Great Britain retained permanently the embassy she had established during the war. Benedict promulgated the new Code of Canon Law, established the Coptic College at Rome, enlarged the foreign mission field, and in his first Encyclical condemned errors in modern philosophical systems. He denounced the violation of Belgium and gave freely to the victims of the war, widows, orphans, and wounded, and established a bureau of communication for prisoners of war with their relatives.
US PGA Commentator - "One of the reasons Arnie (Arnold Palmer) is playing so well is that, before each tee shot, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them .... Oh my god!!!!! What have I just said?!!!"
This is the young Josef Ratzinger, WWII era, as a (reluctant) Hitler Youth. He was also drafted into the FLAK and the RAD, and later was a Heer (Volksturm?) member. He deserted his military life in the Spring of 1945 (April) and returned to his hometown in Bavaria, only to be captured by the U.S. Army. He spent some time as a POW in a U.S. POW camp and took de-Nazification classes, which was most common for former Hitler Youth members (willing or not).
Pope Recalls Being German POW.His father, a police officer, opposed the paganism of the Nazis.He became a Roman Catholic Priest in 1951, at about 24 years old. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153942,00.html
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As a seminarian, he was briefly enrolled in the Hitler Youth in the early 1940s, though he was never a member of the Nazi party. In 1943 he was conscripted into an antiaircraft unit guarding a BMW plant outside Munich. Later Ratzinger was sent to Austria's border with Hungary to erect tank traps. After being shipped back to Bavaria, he deserted. When the war ended, he was an American prisoner of war.
Under Hitler, Ratzinger says he watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth. Their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them. The church's service to society, Ratzinger concluded, is to stand for absolute truths that function as boundary markers: Move about within these limits, but outside them lies disaster.
Later reflection on the Nazi experience also left Ratzinger with a conviction that theology must either bind itself to the church, with its creed and teaching authority, or it becomes the plaything of outside forces -- the state in a totalitarian system or secular culture in Western liberal democracies. In a widely noted 1986 lecture in Toronto, Ratzinger put it this way: "A church without theology impoverishes and blinds, while a churchless theology melts away into caprice."
BERLIN -- In May 1945, thousands of German prisoners of war trudged down the highway toward the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling. Among them -- tired but grateful to be alive -- was 18-year-old Joseph Ratzinger, who days before had risked death by deserting the German army.
"In three days of marching, we hiked down the empty highway, in a column that gradually became endless," the new pope recalled years later in his memoirs.
"The American soldiers photographed us, the young ones, most of all, in order to take home souvenirs of the defeated army and its desolate personnel."
Like his predecessor, John Paul II, Ratzinger was marked by the terror-filled years of World War II. Karol Wojtyla was forced to work in a quarry and narrowly escaped arrest in a mass roundup of young men by the Germans in Krakow; Ratzinger's experiences were also harrowing.
In particular, his decision to leave his army unit just after he turned military age could have cost Ratzinger his life.
At the time, he knew that the dreaded SS units would shoot a deserter on the spot -- or hang him from a lamppost as a warning to others. He recalled his terror when he was stopped by other soldiers.
"Thank God they were ones who had had enough of war and did not want to become murderers," he wrote in his book, "Aus meinem Leben," published in English as "Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977."
"They had to find a reason to let me go. I had my arm in a sling because of an injury."
"Comrade, you are wounded," they told him. "Go on."
Soon he was home with his father, Josef, and his mother, Maria.
For years, he and his family had watched the Nazis strengthen their grip on Germany. His father, a policeman and a convinced anti-Nazi, moved the family at least once after clashing with local followers of the party. A local teacher, he remembered, became an ardent follower of the new movement, and tried to institute a pagan May pole ritual as more fitting of Germanic ways than the traditional, conservative Catholicism.
In 1941, Ratzinger, 14, and his brother, Georg were enrolled in the Hitler Youth when it became mandatory for all boys. Soon after, he writes in his book, "The Salt of the Earth," he was let out because of his intention to study for the priesthood.
In 1943, like many teenage boys, he was drafted as a helper for an anti-aircraft brigade, which defended a BMW plant outside Munich. Later, he dug anti-tank trenches. When he turned 18, on April 16, 1945, he was put through basic training, alongside men in their 30s and 40s, drafted as the Third Reich went through its death agony. He was stationed near his hometown -- he doesn't say where -- but did not see combat with the approaching U.S. troops.
After he returned home, the Americans finally arrived -- and set up their headquarters in his parents 18th century farmhouse on the outskirts of the town.
They identified him as a German soldier, made him put on his uniform, put up his hands, and marched him off to join other prisoners kept in a nearby meadow. Taken to a camp near Ulm, he wound up living outside for several weeks, surrounded by barbed wire.
He was finally released June 19 and hitched a ride on a milk truck back to Traunstein.
His family was happy to see him.
"Of course, for full joy, something was missing. Since the beginning of April, there had been no word from Georg," he remembered. "So there was a quiet worry in our house."
Suddenly, in the middle of July, in walked Georg, tanned and unharmed. He sat at the piano and banged out the hymn, "Grosser Gott, wir Loben Dich," "Mighty God, we Praise You" as his family rejoiced.
The war was truly over.
"The following months of regained freedom, which we now had learned to value so much, belong to the happiest months of my life," he wrote.
Ratzinger was born in Marktl am Inn, in Bavaria, the second son and youngest child of Joseph Ratzinger, Sr. and his wife, Maria, who was employed as a barmaid. His father was a police officer who served in both the Bavarian State Police (Landespolizei) and the national Order Police (Ordnungspolizei), retiring in 1937 to the town of Traunstein. The Sunday Times of London described the elder Ratzinger as "an anti-Nazi whose attempts to rein in Hitler’s brownshirts forced the family to move several times" [1] (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 67,00.html) but other news outlets, including The New York Times said there is no evidence of that claim. The Pope has two elder siblings: Georg Ratzinger, who became a priest as well as a musician, and Maria Ratzinger.
When Ratzinger turned 14 in 1941, he joined the Hitler Youth, membership in which was legally required after 1938. National Catholic Reporter correspondent and biographer John Allen writes that Ratzinger was an unenthusiastic member who refused to attend meetings. Ratzinger has mentioned that a Nazi mathematics professor arranged reduced tuition payments for him at seminary. While this normally required documentation of attendance at Hitler Youth activities, according to Ratzinger, his professor arranged that the young seminary student did not need to attend those gatherings to receive a scholarship.
In 1943, when he was 16, Ratzinger was drafted with many of his classmates into the flak (anti-aircraft corps). They were posted first to Ludwigsfeld, north of Munich, as part of a detachment responsible for guarding a BMW aircraft engine plant that used slave labour from the concentration camp in Dachau. Next they were sent to Unterföhring, northwest of Munich, and briefly to Innsbruck. From Innsbruck their unit went to Gilching to protect the jet fighter base and to attack Allied bombers as they massed to begin their runs towards Munich. At Gilching, Ratzinger served in telephone communications.
On September 10, 1944, his class was released from the Corps. Returning home, Ratzinger had already received a new draft notice for the Reichsarbeitdienst. He was posted to the Hungarian border area of Austria which had been annexed by Germany in the Anschluss of 1938. Here he was trained in the "cult of the spade" and upon the surrender of Hungary to Russia was put to work setting up anti-tank defences in preparation for the expected Red Army offensive. On November 20, his unit was released from service.
Ratzinger again returned home. After three weeks passed, he was drafted into the army at Munich and assigned to the infantry barracks in the center of Traunstein, the city near which his family lived. After basic infantry training, his unit was sent to various posts around the city. They were never sent to the front.
In late April or early May, days or weeks before the German surrender, Ratzinger deserted after two years of service in the German army. He left the city of Traunstein and returned to his village on the outskirts. Desertion was widespread during the last weeks of the war, even though in principle punishable by death; executions, frequently extrajudicial, continued to the end. In the days preceding imminent German defeat, however, many deserted for fear of the more salient Allied threat. Diminished morale, and the greatly diminished risk of execution from a preoccupied German military, also contributed notably to pervasive desertion.
He was briefly interned in an open air prisoner of war camp near Ulm and was released on June 19, 1945.
Most information about Ratzinger's wartime activities is based on his own memoirs and accounts from his brother, Georg.
Can anyone determine which Flak detachment was he this serving in? It seems he was at first stationed at Ludwigsfeld, north of Munich, then at Unterföhring, northwest of Munich and finally at Gilching, where they were apparently protecting a fighter air base. At Gilching, Ratzinger served in telephone communications. Which unit covered that area in 1944?
Opposite to him, his elderly brother Georg Ratzinger, now a retired Catholic priest in Regensburg, has apparently seen much of the fighting, being wounded in Italy in 1944 and captured at the end of World War II. He was a POW of the U.S. Army in the vicinity of Naples (Napoli), but was released, and arrived at home in July of 1945.
I can't understand why some medias are so anxiously pushing forward his image of a former Hitlerjugend member. I too was enrolled in the Communist Youth, when I was 8. And I don't remember anyone asking me whether I wish to join or not. This was something "selbstverstandlich", what everyone had to do. Now whether medias are just mean or ignorant. In any case, it pi**es me off a bit, because if he is marked for the rest of his life, then I guess so am I or what?!? Doesn't make much, if any, sense to me, but it sure makes you feel like a second class citizen.
lp,
Klemen
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US PGA Commentator - "One of the reasons Arnie (Arnold Palmer) is playing so well is that, before each tee shot, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them .... Oh my god!!!!! What have I just said?!!!"
Klemen, that stupidity is exactly what we are trying to fight here. Real facts, not made up facts!
Eh?
US PGA Commentator - "One of the reasons Arnie (Arnold Palmer) is playing so well is that, before each tee shot, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them .... Oh my god!!!!! What have I just said?!!!"
God sometimes really works in myterious ways. 
