April
19, 2005
Criticism of Ratzinger's Youthful Past Unfounded
By Ed
Koch
Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger of Germany has been elected as the next Pope
of the Roman Catholic Church and will take the name Benedict XVI.
There are some who may criticize the election of Cardinal Ratzinger,
since he joined the Hitler Youth at age 14 as a child growing
up in Germany. I think any such criticism is unfounded.
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.
One of the
highest priorities of the new Pope hopefully will be to maintain
a close relationship between Jews and Catholics, an effort begun
by Pope John XXIII and vastly expanded by Pope John Paul II. I
hope it is seen as a priority by the new Pope. Of course, the
new Pope will continue to seek a reconciliation with other Christian
faiths and a continuing dialogue with the representatives of Islam.
Cardinal Ratzinger in his homily delivered immediately before
the conclave said he does not believe in syncretism, the attempt
to reconcile different faiths. He probably would not attend on
any occasion the service of another faith. He is not alone in
this position. Orthodox rabbis (but not Conservative or Reform
rabbis) take the same position as do some Protestant clergy. Indeed,
some would go so far as to seek to punish a member of their sect
if he were to participate in or even attend a joint service commemorating
a public event, including memorializing a tragedy such as 9-11.
Pope John Paul II visited a Roman synagogue -- the first Pope
to do so -- and placed a written prayer in a crevice of the Western
Wall. That, for me, set the standard. It is my hope that Cardinal
Ratzinger as Pope will follow in his footsteps, and that others,
Jewish and Protestant, will embrace as John Paul II did, members
of other faiths, remembering we will all ultimately answer to
the same God.
Ed
Koch is the former Mayor of New York City.
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