The prisoners lived without any sense of time; only with difficulty could they figure out exactly what day it was, and they received no news at all from outside. On one occasion, though, the men noticed that the Americans set off some real fireworks with their pyrotechnic rounds. It was May 8, 1945. At one point, the rumor circulated that the war was over; Germany had capitulated. The men breathed more easily and hoped that consequently their release was imminent. Then someone maintained that the Americans were now going to advance against the Russians. Supposedly they intended to arm all the German POWs and send them into the new war. But most of them could not imagine that the league of the Allies would break up so quickly, and they hoped for peace soon. The notebook that Joseph Ratzinger had brought with him into imprisonment proved to be wonderful company. Every day he entrusted to it his thoughts and reflections about God and the world, history, and his situation. He even tried his hand at a few Greek hexameters so as to keep his mind occupied and to fill the empty time. In the camp, too, initiatives were soon taken by men who tried to derive something useful from the desolate incarceration. Priests were found who celebrated Holy Mass each day, and academics developed a real lecture series.
Then the releases began. At first farmers were allowed to go home, and, understandably enough, very many suddenly remembered they had a farm or at least relatives in the country. Finally, on June 19, 1945, Joseph Ratzinger had his turn, too. After a series of reviews and examinations, and after being sprayed with insecticides—somehow the Americans thought all Germans had lice—he finally held his release certificate in his hands. A U.S. truck brought a group of men as far as northern Munich, and from there on they had to fend for themselves. Joseph and a young man from a neighboring village set out on the road. They had calculated that it would take them three days to travel the approximately 75 miles to Traunstein. They hoped that along the way they could spend the night at farmhouses and perhaps get something to eat there. But they had just passed Ottobrunn when a milk truck running on wood gas overtook them. The two young men were too shy to flag it down, and so the driver himself stopped and asked where they were headed. When they mentioned Traunstein, he laughed; he belonged to a dairy in Traunstein and was making the trip back. Even before sunset, Joseph was home. Overjoyed, his parents and his sister welcomed him. The simple meal his mother quickly prepared for him—a small salad from the garden, an egg from the chickens, and a big piece of bread—became the most delicious meal of his life. Only one thing troubled the joy of their reunion: it was still uncertain what had become of his brother. Only later in July did a tanned Georg suddenly stand in front of the house, too. . .
We, too, were brought at first from Italy to the big release camp near Bad Aibling, where my brother had been only a few weeks before. Later Günter Grass told about meeting him there, but he probably just imagined the incident. Maybe he really was at that camp, but in another place or at another point in time. My brother has such an excellent memory that he surely would be able to remember it even today if he had dug a hole, played dice, and spoken about his future with a fellow prisoner who wanted to become an artist. That may be a nice story, but it is not a true one.
In 2006, Günter Grass, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, claimed in his autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel [Peeling the Onion], that he was with Joseph Ratzinger in the prisoner of war camp near Bad Aibling and at that time befriended the future pope. Later, in an interview with Frank Schirrmacher, the publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Grass said: “I always sat in the camp in Bad Aibling together with guys my own age. We seventeen-year-olds used to squat, when it rained, in a hole we had dug for ourselves. We had spread a tarp over it to keep out the rain. One hundred thousand prisoners of war were gathered there in the open. And one of them was named Joseph, who was extremely Catholic and occasionally uttered quotations in Latin. He became my friend and dice partner, for I had been able to salvage a dice-box and bring it to the camp. We spent time together, played dice, talked, and speculated about the future, as youngsters like to do. I wanted to become an artist, and he wanted to have a career in the Church. He seemed a bit stuck-up to me, but he was a nice fellow. That really is a nice story, don’t you think?”
In any case, I arrived there a few weeks later and found an immense crowd of soldiers who had to camp there under the most miserable circumstances. There was practically no blanket, no tent, nothing. We were fed a brown soup, a cup of coffee, and a few pieces of bread. At night you went to sleep simply by lying on the bare ground; thank heavens we had nice weather and were released after only three days.
On that third day, an American officer came into the camp, and we all had to stand in formation. Then he arranged us in groups geographically: Oberbayern (Upper Bavaria), Unterbayern—he actually said “Unterbayern” and apparently did not know that the correct term is “Niederbayern” (Lower Bavaria)—and so on. He handed our regional group over to a black American, who brought us to a group of trucks that were all driven by colored soldiers. There he assigned me to the group of men who wanted to go to Traunstein. A later priest confrere, who was ordained after me, was there, too. No sooner had we boarded the truck than the black driver started off at a hellish speed; first he drove along the Munich-Salzburg highway and finally took the exit at Schweinbach, while chewing his gum the entire time, which for us was a rather unusual sight. Then he stopped and shouted something to us, and we got off feeling rather sick to our stomachs. Furthermore, I did not know whether my parents and my brother were still alive or whether our house still stood, for it was months since I had been in touch with anyone back home. Nevertheless, I ran rather than walked to my parents’ house.
The last photo of the family residence in Hufschlag near Traunstein before their move (1955) shows Georg Ratzinger (right) and his parents
When I was finally home, I saw Mother outside pumping water; we had our own well in front of the house, because water mains had not yet been laid. I was so happy to see her again, and it was a big surprise and a joy for her, too. I had waited so long for that moment! After we had embraced, we went into the house, where my father and my siblings were actually waiting only for Mother. What happened then cannot be described in words; you simply had to be there. Even before I said anything, I sat right down at the piano and played the Te Deum: “Holy God, we praise Thy Name.” To me it was no coincidence that we could all be together again but, rather, a providential arrangement; we all were of the same opinion at the time. The fact that we had come through so many trying situations during the war unscathed confirmed us both, my brother and me, in our conviction that God had plans for us. The experience of the war years, indeed, confronted us with feelings of fear we had not known before. We were forced into a world that had previously been completely unknown to us and that we would never have imagined to be so brutal. We literally looked death in the face. That brought with it a certain new orientation and caused us suddenly to treasure many things we had previously taken for granted. Yet it confirmed us all the more in our intention to try to become priests.
The young priests with their family in July 1951
VI
Freising and Fürstenried
(1946-1951)
The period immediately after the war was a happy time for us. The fact that they were also difficult, meager years seemed to us a secondary matter. We had survived the war, but, above all, the godless regime that brought so much suffering upon the people had been conquered.
Now our father had always known that this would be the outcome. From the first day on, he saw that the war was lost, that Hitler had to lose it, because evil simply could not and must not be victorious. If Germany had won that war, it would not have been a gain for our country but, rather, a catastrophe for the whole world. Then Hitler, with his boundless egotism, would have ruled the world; then by his arbitrary will he would not have shaped it but rather deformed and terrorized it. For that reason alone, it was unthinkable to us that God, who is Lord of his
tory, would allow his victory. Of course in the first years, there were several upsetting events, like the victories in Poland and France, but no sooner had he marched into the Soviet Union than what had to happen happened, and the path of destiny led the German Reich directly into a catastrophe.
Nevertheless, many things we learned after the war surpassed even our bleakest suspicions. Of course we knew already during the Nazi period that there were concentration camps in which people were murdered. After all, the Dachau concentration camp was located quite near Munich and was something about which we all had heard. From various acquaintances we learned that relatives of theirs had been put to death. That even touched our family. I remember, for instance, our cousin, the son of one of our mother’s sisters, a very sweet, happy boy. He was mentally handicapped, though. So he was not capable of speaking correctly or of taking part in a conversation. I do not know what diagnosis was made of his condition; I myself was still in primary school at the time. Later we learned that the Nazis went to his house, took him away, and then murdered him, because in their inhuman ideology he was considered a “life not worth living”. In Aschau we were acquainted with an old, childless married couple who were always so happy when we came to visit. One day the husband died of pneumonia, and the wife, Frau Westenthanner, had a gradual onset of dementia. We heard only that she was brought to Linz by government officials and died there. It was general knowledge that in the vicinity of Linz the Nazis gathered people who were mentally ill (or thought to be such) and, to their way of thinking, no longer useful to society, and then killed them. In those days, you said someone had been “gelinzt”. The inhabitants of Linz did not know this expression, but among us it was a set phrase, and everybody knew what it meant when someone said that a person had been “gelinzt”. Killing human beings who were useless, in the Nazis’ opinion, or who just had a different world view was part of the Nazi agenda. Of course, all that was murder. Only after the war did we learn about the major genocide inflicted on the Jews, but even that horrible fact did not surprise us, because we knew that the Nazis were capable of any crime, that they feared nothing and thought and behaved in a really demonic way. The mass murder of the Jews was the summit, so to speak, the gruesome crowning achievement among their crimes and the ultimate proof of what unscrupulous, inhumane, and despicable criminals they were. It was different from their other murders, though, in the first place, because of the number of victims and the systematic way in which they were destroyed. In any case, we were profoundly shaken when we learned about it, but the murders of people whom we knew had already disillusioned us. Unfortunately we also knew that resistance from within could never have swept those criminals away; it had to happen from outside. Consequently, we regarded our so-called “enemies”, Germany’s military opponents, as our liberators, to whom we were grateful for having ended the Nazi reign of terror.
Anti-Semitism was never an issue either in my family or among our acquaintances. We regarded everyone as a fellow human being, even if he was a Nazi, although we were cautious about the Nazis from the start and kept our distance because we could not trust them. Yet neither in Aschau nor in Traunstein were we acquainted with any Jews, and so we did not hear much about the anti-Semitic outrages of 1933, Kristallnacht in 1938, orof course the deportation of Jews. Only in school, in the course on “National Socialist ideology” (NG) that was always taught on Saturday, did they try to persuade us that Jews were wicked. Then suddenly we were warned about the Jews in history class, too. Naturally, we never took that seriously, for we could tell where this claim originated and knew with what sort of lies and calumnies the Nazis worked. But neither did we ever have a personal encounter with a Jew; it was simply that not that many of them lived in East Bavarian villages and towns, and so it was not something we discussed.
Benedict XVI has made more intensive efforts at reconciliation with the Jews than any pope before him; this is evident from the mere fact that he has visited more synagogues than any of his predecessors—namely, the synagogue in Cologne in August 2005, a synagogue in New York in April 2008, and in January 2010 the synagogue in Rome. In Auschwitz and at the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem, he clearly denounced any form of anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish sentiment, and in Jerusalem he prayed at the Wailing Wall. Immediately after his installation, he wrote to the Jewish community of Rome, and he was the first pope to invite a rabbi to address the Synod of Bishops. In his important two-volume study Jesus of Nazareth, he not only cites Jewish commentators on the New Testament but also makes an effort to understand Jesus and his gospel in its original Jewish context. Instead of “older brothers”, he describes the Jews as our “fathers in faith”. Thus, he declared in an interview with Peter Seewald: “I must say that from the very first day when I began to study theology, the intrinsic unity of the Old and the New Covenants, of the two parts of Holy Scripture, was somehow immediately clear to me. . . . Then as Germans we were of course shaken by what had happened in the Third Reich, which gave us a special reason to look with humility and shame, and with love, upon the People of Israel” (LW 81-82).
Naturally, as pope and as especially as a German, my brother knows the obligation he has to promote reconciliation with the Jews. On the one hand, this is a direct consequence of German history, but much of it also goes back to his intensive contacts with the Integrierte Gemeinde in Munich. I think that in grappling with the studies by Professor Ludwig Weimar and Professor Rudolf Pesch some things became clear to him about the importance of the dialogue with Judaism.
After a prehistory of over twenty years, the Katholische Integrierte Gemeinde (KIG, Catholic Integrated Community) was lifted from the baptismal font in 1968 by a group of Catholics in Munich. Their starting point had been questions that were raised after World War II: “What is wrong with our Church when, despite the many millions of baptized persons in Europe, Christians waged two world wars against each other in the twentieth century; when in spite of so many Christians, the social question broached over a hundred years ago could not be solved, so that death-dealing dictatorships and ideologies such as Communism and National Socialism were able to develop and dominate? What has gone missing from our Church, that her faithful could not prevent the Shoah, the murder of six million Jews during the Third Reich?” Consequently, the KIG is especially committed to understanding the New Testament from a Jewish perspective and demands “that the Israel of the Old Testament be perceived anew in its significance as the root of the Church and that living Judaism be regarded as a correcting partner who reminds us of this root.” Already as a theologian, Joseph Ratzinger had come into contact with the Integrierte Gemeinde; as Archbishop of Munich, he was to approve their statutes and recognize them as an independent “apostolic community” subject to the ecclesial supervision of the local ordinary.
Today I live in the immediate neighborhood of the Jewish community of Regensburg, which has its synagogue here on the same street, Luzengasse. Until recently it was under the direction of Herr Hans Rosengold (1923-2011), with whom I have always maintained a good, neighborly relationship. Sometimes he visited me, sometimes I him, as neighbors do, for he was really a very nice man whom I esteemed very highly. The caretaker of the community, a Jew who emigrated from Russia, is very friendly, too; he is extremely courteous and helpful. He knows that my vision is poor, and when something along the street is being repaired and there are obstacles, he comes out and guides me past it. He has often helped my housekeeper, too, Frau Heindl, and carried the heavy bag when she was coming home from shopping. He also stops by our house from time to time, brings us newspapers and Jewish matzos (unleavened wafers) and that sweet Pesach wine. Not long ago when I was in the hospital, because I had a knee operation, he even visited me there and brought me some grapes. He and his wife are just very dear, friendly people who can be an example of humaneness to everybody. When my brother was in Regensburg in 2006, the Jewish community provided kosher food for part of his entourage, his so-called seguito. So we really have a wonderful neighb
orly relationship. In the postwar years, we could never have even dreamed that relations between Germans and Jews would one day be so happily normalized as is the case nowadays. Naturally we are glad about that, and we are grateful for it.
But back to the events of 1945! During the years when I was away at war, Joseph became a man. When I was drafted in 1942, he was just sixteen years old and actually still just a kid; his voice had not fully changed, and he was somewhere between a boy and a man. When we saw each other again after the war, he was already completely grown up. Of course we had a lot to tell each other; I talked about my experiences in the war, and he about his. But when I was in the minor seminary, our paths had already diverged, and we were no longer together as much as in our care-free childhood. I also had different friends from his; more the boys who were interested in music, whereas my brother mainly had friends who were science-oriented. During our school years at the seminary, we were both so tied up by the daily schedule that we hardly had any time left to see each other, but of course we made up for it during vacations. But now, after the end of the war, we were living together again and were to spend at least the next few years more or less together again.
Shortly after the end of the war, on November 9th, 1945, our parents celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary. It was a time of great poverty, and so the celebration of this nonetheless beautiful jubilee was modest. The day began with Mass in the parish church, with my brother the celebrant. I played the organ and sang some hymns, while our sister sat in the pews with our parents. A few dear friends brought us small gifts, a jar of honey, for example. Then our mother, always so resourceful, made the most of the little we had and prepared a wonderful midday meal. It was the only wedding anniversary our parents were able to celebrate festively together. Our father had died a year before their 40th anniversary.
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