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Pope’s Wartime Activities Resurface on Israeli Trip
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: May 12, 2009
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JERUSALEM — The Vatican sought on Tuesday to defend Pope PRINT  
Benedict XVI against criticism of his speech at the Yad Vashem See Sample  |  Privacy Policy
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Enlarge This Image But as has become familiar in

Pool photo by Pier Paolo Cito
Pope Benedict XVI prayed in front of
the Western Wall in Jerusalem on
Tuesday. The pope also visited a
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Multimedia
Benedict’s four years as pope, the MOST POPULAR
attempt at media relations stumbled, E-MAILED BLOGGED SEARCHED VIEWED
in a particularly awkward way for a trip to Israel: the
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German pope’s spokesman first said that Benedict “never,
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never, never” had belonged to the Hitler Youth but later 3. In Mezuzas, a Custom Inherited by Gentiles
had to issue a retraction. 4. Thousands of Trees Killed by New York Tornadoes
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The spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was working
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to counter both criticism of the speech — blasted in the 7. Bob Herbert: Two Different Worlds
press here as at best a bland missed moment for a German 8. Well: Phys Ed: Can Exercise Make Kids Smarter?
pope who experienced the Holocaust firsthand — and 9. Shortcuts: For the Dishwasher’s Sake, Go Easy on
hostility from some in Israel to the pope himself. the Detergent
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Even before the pope spoke on Monday, the day he arrived
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in Israel, a cartoon in the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot
showed him at Yad Vashem looking at a photo of a group
of Hitler Youth and saying, “Hey, that’s me.”

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But in saying that the pope, then known as Joseph
Ratzinger, had never served in the Hitler Youth, Father Find your dream home with
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Lombardi contradicted the statements from the pope
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Indeed, in a book-length interview with the journalist Peter TimesCast, a daily news video.
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Seewald in 1997, Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, said,
Israel Closes Media Center,
Upsetting Palestinians (May 12,
“As a seminarian, I was registered in the Hitler Youth.” He
2009) added, “As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went
back.”

Reared in a Catholic family in Bavaria, where the church was seen in many ways as a
bulwark against Nazism, Benedict was later drafted into the German Army, where he
served in an antiaircraft unit.

Father Lombardi quickly changed course, but that only served to complicate the issue of
Benedict’s wartime record and underscore what critics and supporters alike say is the
Vatican’s problematic public relations apparatus, which does not seem to have improved
despite repeated missteps. He said that he had opened the issue of the pope’s wartime past
— which in most minds was long settled in Benedict’s favor — to counter negative
accounts, especially in the Israeli press, that Benedict was an enthusiastic Nazi in his
youth.

“This fact of the Hitler Youth had no role in his life and in his personality,” Father
Lombardi said.
The issue resonated strongly, given that Benedict’s first visit to the Holy Land as pope
came four months after he provoked outrage by revoking the excommunication of four
schismatic bishops, one of whom, a Briton, Richard Williamson, has denied the scope of
the Holocaust. Benedict later condemned anti-Semitism and said he had not been aware
of the bishop’s views.

The episode distracted from Benedict’s visits on Tuesday to place a prayer in the Western
Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, and to the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine where
the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven.

It also revealed the extent of the Vatican’s defensiveness over criticism of Benedict’s speech
on Monday, when he mused on memory and expressed the “deep compassion” of the
Roman Catholic Church over the “millions of Jews killed” in the Holocaust but never used
the word German or Nazi. Nor did he speak about his own experiences, though many said
they were waiting to hear about them.

In a scathing front-page editorial in Haaretz, a columnist, Tom Segev, wrote: “Benedict

chose to phrase even the most universal lessons of the Holocaust in abstract terms. These
may still have a place in the lecture hall of a German theology professor, but in the
Internet age, they are little more than empty banalities.”

Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of Israel’s Parliament, said: “The pope spoke like a historian, as
somebody observing from the sidelines, about things that shouldn’t happen. But what can
you do? He was part of them.”

Even the director of the museum expressed disappointment.

The issue is also delicate because the Vatican and Israel, long at odds over the wartime
legacy of Pius XII, who was pope from 1939 until 1958, agreed that Benedict would enter
the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem and not the museum because it had a
contentious plaque criticizing Pope Pius XII for not doing enough to help save Jews
during the Holocaust.

In light of this, many were hoping for a stronger statement from Benedict at Yad Vashem.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Father Lombardi tried to set the record straight,
pointing out other times when Benedict had addressed the Holocaust. “Maybe sometimes
he feels he was not well understood,” he said. “I feel the same.”

Visiting Auschwitz as pope in 2006, Benedict called himself “a son of the German
people.” (He also drew criticism from his description of the Nazis as “a ring of criminals”
who had “used and abused” the German people, phrases that seemed to reduce the scope
of German culpability.)

In 2005, on one of his first trips as pope, he visited the Cologne synagogue and marked the
60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, “in which millions of
Jews — men, women and children — were put to death in the gas chambers and ovens.”

On Thursday, Father Lombardi said: “They expect him every time to repeat. This is not
possible.”

Yet to some, if there was ever a time to repeat, his visit to Yad Vashem was it.

“It shows a lack of emotional understanding on the need to say certain things in certain
places even if you’ve said them before,” said Rabbi David Rosen, international director of
interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee and one of the Vatican’s main
Jewish interlocutors.

On Wednesday, Benedict is scheduled to travel to Bethlehem, where he will celebrate Mass

in Manger Square, meet the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and visit the Aida
refugee camp. On Thursday, he will celebrate Mass in Nazareth, before returning to Rome
on Friday.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 13, 2009, on page A5 More Articles in World »
 of the New York edition.

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Past Coverage
On His Tour, Pope Runs Into Politics of Middle East and Holocaust (May 12, 2009)
In Letter to Bishops, Pope Admits 'Mistakes' (March 12, 2009)
Pope Orders Bishop to Recant Holocaust Denials (February 5, 2009)
Group Says Pope Will Weigh Delay of Pius's Beatification (October 31, 2008)

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