Criticism of Ratzinger's Youthful Past Unfounded

With the election Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, the leftists have started to whine, hand wring and gnash their teeth over the fact that Pope Benedict XVI, was a member of the Hitler Youth at the age of 14. They ignore the record of the man as a clergyman and reach back to his youth. How desperate are these poeple? Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City, has some commnets.

How can the decision to join the Hitler Youth corps be the responsibility of a child? The Nazis brilliantly exploited German children with the games and military outfits that most youngsters enjoy. Former New York Times Executive Editor, Max Frankel, in the opening paragraph of his book, The Times of My Life and My Life With The Times, summed up a child’s feelings at the time: “I was not yet three years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and I could have become a good little Nazi in his army. I loved the parades: I wept when other kids marched beneath our window without me. But I was ineligible for the Aryan race, the Master Race that Hitler wanted to purify of Jewish blood and other pollutants so that it could rule the world for ‘a thousand years.’”

The leader of the Hitler Jugend, Balder von Shirach, was convicted at Nuremberg after the war and sentenced to 20 years in prison. However, the Allies did not find that the Hitler Jugend organization itself was a criminal organization.

If Cardinal Ratzinger had not joined the Hitler Youth, it would have been because his parents kept him out, which some but very few parents did with their children. While Germans were not automatically jailed or shot for such conduct, you can be sure that refusing to cooperate with the Nazi authorities would had subjected them to adversity. Very few people had the courage to stand up to the Nazi murderers, especially when their children’s lives were involved.

Joining the Hilter Youth was expected, and almost mandatory, if you wanted to live your life in Nazi Germany with a minimun of danger.

So the left starts it's character assasination of the new Pope. - Sailor