Soldier Ratzinger, the most controversial part of the life of the Pope emeritus

Joseph Ratzinger never wore the uniform of the Hitler Youth, as has been said.

The youth organization of the Nazis in Traunstein, the small Upper Bavarian town between Munich and Salzburg, where the future Benedict XVI was studying for priesthood, was dissolved in 1943 "due to insufficient membership" in the local seminary.

As an alternative, Private Ratzinger, born in Marktl am Inn, in Bavaria, on April 16, 1927, was posted in the Army as an adjutant in anti-aircraft batteries.

He was 16 years old and had sworn allegiance to Hitler on New Year's Eve.

The outbreak of World War II had changed his life when he was still in high school.

Frail, almost puny, what worried him the most then was that the Nazis made gymnastics a compulsory subject for college.

"It was a fatal prospect, the possibility of not approving could not be ruled out," he says in

the monumental 1,150-page biography that hits Spanish bookstores these days, edited by Mensajero.

It was written by Peter Seewald after meeting with the Pontiff Emeritus on multiple occasions over a decade.

When Hitler commits suicide on May 1, 1945, Ratzinger is 18 years old, wears a heavy gray wool uniform with the Army eagle showing the swastika and decides to go home on his own.

“Desertion is not a flight or a withdrawal out of fear, but a reasoned decision.

He has already done his part in a way;

there's nothing left for him to do, ”says Seewald.

It is, by the way, the same attitude that leads him, many years later, to resign from the pontificate after almost eight years in command of the Roman Church.

Why did you quit?

Benedict XVI doubted a lot.

The biography reviews some of the problems he was facing, now weak in health, surrounded by

(the metaphor is from

the Vatican newspaper), overwhelmed by scandals that he feels he cannot solve, especially the of pedophilia, betrayed by some collaborators, fed up with gossip and surprised by internal divisions.

"They even fear for his life," he hears people say.

When he decides to leave, he does so with two affirmations: “I have struggled with the Lord.

Do not talk more".

Seewald draws this conclusion: "Ratzinger was convinced that not only the dissolution of dogmas considered indissoluble was at stake, but also a new schism, this time on the left."

But we were in that Private Ratzinger (“he was not a particularly good marksman”, it can be read on page 131) has deserted at the risk of his life, manages to get home and studies with his parents how to prepare for the arrival of the victors.

Those who appear are two members of the SS, the criminal parallel police of the Nazis.

The father blew all the anger he felt against Hitler in their faces.

“Normally it would have had lethal consequences, but a special angel seems to protect us.

The two left the next day without causing us any harm, ”says the Pope.

When the Americans appear on May 7, the day before the official end of the war, a tank aims the guns at the Ratzinger house.

They look for hidden soldiers.

They see the boy's uniform, force him to put it on again, and take him on foot, hands on his head, to the Bad Aibling prison camp, where he lives in the open in bad weather, along with 50,000 other captives.

It stays there 40 days.

Free due to his almost childlike appearance, a military vehicle takes him to Munich, where years later he will be a professor of Theology - a true star in the field;

archbishop of the archdiocese and cardinal, then the youngest in the world (50 years).

But now he has to start walking home, some 75 miles.

A milk tanker pulls up beside him.

The driver invites him to get on.

He is too shy to hitchhike.

"God was absolutely absent," concludes the future Pope about Hitler's Reich.

One in three Germans born between 1910 and 1925 (Ratzinger is from the fifth of 27) did not survive the war.

Many of the surviving soldiers took years to return home, sentenced to forced labor in the victorious countries.

Conversely, Germany caused unspeakable damage: 50 million dead, half civilians, of which some 10 million died in concentration camps.

Of the 9.6 million European Jews, the Nazis murdered about six million.

The count is made by Seewald in a river biography, definitive for those who have been distinguished by the Pope Emeritus with dozens of hours of conversation and 2,000 questions answered with camaraderie.

Former director of one of the major media in his country, the writer thus culminates the series of books that he has dedicated to the German Pope, two of them signed by Ratzinger himself.

Benedict XVI has been criticized for not writing about Germany's darkest period, despite the fact that he was a highly politicized young man, with a radically anti-Nazi Christian Democratic father.

"In his memoirs he recounts the barely two years he was mobilized as a rather fleeting episode," says Seewald (page 115).

You have to go to the book

2016, also from Ediciones Mensajero, to find out the reasons.

Question: “In your works you rarely address the subject of the Third Reich and Hitler's fascism.

For what is this?".

Answer: “Well, one always looks to the future.

Also, that was not my specific topic.

We had lived the experience, but I did not consider it my task to reflect historically or philosophically about it ”.

Seewald warns him about how "the involvement of the Church in the Nazi system was in the air."

Ratzinger: “Now things are presented as if the entire Church had been an instrument of the Nazis.

I still remember well how after the war suddenly no one wanted to admit that they had been a Nazi, to the point that our parish priest said: 'As long as this continues like this, in the end it will be said that the only Nazis were the priests.'

He concedes, however, “in a self-critical spirit, that Christian anti-Semitism too paved the way to some extent for the rise of the Nazis” (page 171).

Peter Seewald turns to the sociologists Heinz Bude and Helmut Schelsky to describe as a “skeptical generation” the adolescents recruited by Hitler as soldiers in a war that was already lost.

He cites, among others, Günter Grass, Nobel Prize for Literature and Prince of Asturias Prize winner in 1999. He was also recruited at the age of 16, he himself, in the Hitler Youth;

he was wounded and captured in Marienbad on May 8, 1945, a day after Ratzinger's arrest, and was a prisoner in the Bad Aibling camp, like the Pontiff.

Grass, notorious Social Democrat, published

in 2007

, where he recounts his life as a soldier, until then hidden.

It was a huge scandal, but it also served to delve into Benedict XVI's military circumstances.

“His youth was not normal.

They returned traumatized from the war and had to assimilate the fact that the greatest crimes in the history of mankind had been perpetrated in their name ”, concludes Seewald.

The diagnosis does not serve the politicized Ratzinger, firm in his conservative ideas, alarmed by the revolts of May 68, hammer of theologians and contrary to many of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, where he had stood out, however, as one of the more reformist theologians.

He presided with an iron hand, for decades, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is what the Holy Office of the Inquisition is now called.

"Be magnanimous," John Paul II used to ask him.

The aversion to the changes prevented it.

Already Pope, he signed in his encyclical

of 2009, a phrase that destroys any intellectual biography.

"Humanism that excludes God is an inhuman humanism," he sentenced against atheist indifferentism and relativism.