Aside from requiring that it accept guilt, the Allies prohibited Germany from negotiating any terms of the treaty. The German people took to the streets to voice their anger and humiliation at the loss of 10 percent of the nation’s territories, all of its overseas colonies, 15 percent of its population, and vast swathes of its iron and coal industries. Germany was also ordered, in 1921, to pay reparations to the eye-watering tune of 132 billion gold marks (thirty-one billion dollars). Hyperinflation ensued, and when the country inevitably defaulted on its payments, in 1923, an attempt was made by the Allied governments to stabilize the economy. But the damage had already been done, and Ratzinger’s early years were overshadowed by the sense of a country on its knees: “unemployment was rife; war reparations weighed heavily on the German economy; battles among the political parties set people against one another.”
It was during this deeply turbulent period of economic depression that another shadow was beginning to stretch over Germany: the rise to power of Adolf Hitler.
THE ADVANCING CLOUDS OF WAR
Ratzinger’s memories of the early 1930s are those of a child, but he writes of a growing awareness of “shrill campaign posters,” of constant elections and heated public meetings during which his father would, time and again, have to “take a position against the violence of the Nazis.” Joseph Ratzinger Sr.’s open criticism of the Brownshirts eventually became untenable, and in December 1932 he requested a transfer to the “well-to-do agricultural village” of Aschau am Inn.
But there was no escaping. Just over a month later, on January 30, 1933, following two elections that failed to produce a majority government, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany.
Ratzinger himself has no memory of this historic moment, but his brother, Georg, and sister, Maria, recounted how on that fateful rainy day their school was ordered to “perform a march through the village that, of course, soon turned into a tramp through the slush that could hardly have fired anyone’s enthusiasm.” If only this had been the case everywhere. Hitler’s ascendency unleashed an overwhelming sense of nationalism, and formerly closeted Nazis were suddenly confident in expressing their political sentiments publicly. The Hitler Youth and League of German Girls soon swept into every village, and Georg and Maria, much to their parents’ horror, were “obliged to participate in their activities.”
What Ratzinger later remembered from those first four years under Hitler’s rule was the insidious campaign against religion, “the practice of spying and informing on priests who behaved as ‘enemies of the Reich.’” Schools in Bavaria were often closely linked to the church, so new teachers loyal to the party were soon installed, and the curriculum was changed in line with their ideology. Yet again Joseph Senior did what he could to stand against the tide of persecution and would “warn and aid priests he knew were in danger.” But he was fighting a losing battle.
Internationally, Hitler began to set his sights on reclaiming territories stripped from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles; at home, he encouraged the people to reconnect with what Ratzinger in his memoir describes as their “great Germanic culture.” Long-forgotten midsummer ceremonies celebrating the “sacredness of nature” were reintroduced, with maypoles erected on village greens. The aesthetic power of such scenes could not have been lost on the former art student who now ruled as chancellor, but it was not just propaganda that motivated these initiatives. In giving the people new rituals to celebrate, Hitler believed that he could remove the power that Judeo-Christianity had held over people through “alien notions such as sin and redemption.” In eradicating religion from society, he would clear the way for his ideology. In this he partially succeeded, though one glimmer of hope Ratzinger remembered was that Hitler’s “rhetorical formulas” were actually too subtle for the brawny young local men, who were purely focused on being the fastest to climb the maypole and retrieve the prized Bavarian sausages that adorned the top.
As Joseph Senior approached his sixtieth birthday, and mandatory retirement, in 1937, the family relocated once more. This time it was not to another set of borrowed police station–house quarters, but to a home of their own.
The Ratzingers had four years earlier purchased an eighteenth-century farmhouse surrounded by beautiful meadows and fruit trees, on the edge of a sprawling pine forest at the foot of the mountains, just outside the small southern Bavarian town of Traunstein, located west of the Austrian border. It was from here that the children could escape into the hills and woods while their parents threw themselves into renovating the tumbledown house into something quite magical—a place the young Joseph considered the family’s “true home.”
As well as nature, his life began to be shaped increasingly by the church. He followed in his brother Georg’s footsteps and became an altar boy, although the future pope noted in his memoirs that he “could not compete with [Georg] in either zeal or diligence.” In Bavarian society at this time, Ratzinger writes that for both the devoutly religious and those bound merely by social conventions, “no one could conceive of dying without the Church or of experiencing the great events of life without her. Life then would have simply fallen into the void, would have lost the solid ground that supported it and gave it meaning.” He delighted in the structure, or “rhythm,” as he described it, with which the church bookmarked the year, and there was always some celebration to look forward to. Joseph Senior and Maria encouraged their children’s understanding of the liturgy through picture books for Sundays and major feast days when they were very young, moving them on to the complete missal for the celebration of mass on each day of the year by the time the family reached Traunstein.
Ratzinger later stated, in a 1997 interview with Peter Seewald, that “there was no lightning-like moment of illumination when I realized I was meant to become a priest. On the contrary there was a long process of maturation.” Yet he recalls in his memoirs that it was at this time in his life when he “started down the road of liturgy, and this became a continuous process of growth into a grand reality transcending all particular individuals and generations, a reality that became an occasion for me of ever-new amazement and discovery.” When comparing the Germanic reserve with which he recounts his vocational journey to the priesthood to that of his Argentine successor, we can trace their future conflicting styles all the way back to these moments in childhood. They are the open versus the closed. Just as the lightning-bolt moment experienced by Bergoglio mirrors his later life as a “Bishop of the Slums” who kissed the feet of AIDS sufferers, so too does the calling experienced by our shy and retiring theologian Joseph Ratzinger, a self-described “perfectly ordinary Christian” who simply felt that “God had a plan for each person,” himself included.
The idyll of their new home could not last. Already searchlights were being erected to scan the night skies for enemy aircraft, and a secret ammunitions factory was being built nearby, sheltered from view by trees in the neighboring woods. Young Ratzinger found to his dismay that his new school, despite its remoteness, was also capitulating to the pressure of Hitler’s regime. His beloved Latin lessons were cut back, and Greek was removed altogether; old songs now included lines of Nazi propaganda; and religious education was prohibited in favor of sports and outdoor pursuits.
On March 12, 1938, German troops marched into Hitler’s homeland and annexed Austria. As Ratzinger puts it, “no one could ignore the movement of troops,” but as a devoutly Catholic family living in a border village, the “Greater Germany” created by the Anschluss (annexation) presented them with a startling new freedom of movement. The Ratzingers were now able to make pilgrimages to Salzburg and its many “glorious churches”; they were delighted that ticket prices for the city’s renowned music festival were greatly reduced because the approaching war deterred other tourists from visiting. There is a refreshing candor in his memoir in the way Ratzinger reflects on the moral dilemmas faced by German families such as his: they feared what Hitler’s aggression would bring but also sometimes benefite
d from it in small ways.
The benefits were short-lived. Almost immediately after the Anschluss, the pace and vigor of Hitler’s international campaign surged. In the absence of any challenge to his aggression, he was further appeased by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain at the now-infamous Munich Conference, and successfully reclaimed the former German territory of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in September 1938. Shortly after Chamberlain triumphantly waved his piece of white paper to the world, declaring he had secured “peace in our time,” Hitler’s true intentions were revealed when, on November 9–10—Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass)—his paramilitary forces and their supporters across Germany destroyed some seventy-five hundred Jewish businesses, burned a thousand synagogues, murdered ninety-one Jews, and arrested more than thirty thousand Jewish men aged between sixteen and sixty and sent them to the new concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
The events caused international outrage. The Times of London wrote, “No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.” Yet, in his memoirs, Joseph Ratzinger makes no mention of Kristallnacht or the ongoing Nazi persecution of Jews, though there is no doubt whatsoever that he would have encountered it on a daily basis. For years.
In the early 1930s, in his own village of Traunstein, signs were erected over Jewish businesses to advise residents: “Do not buy from the Jew. He sells you, farmers, out of house and home.” Ratzinger alludes time and again in his memoir to his family’s anti-Nazi stance, and they were likely no more guilty of complicity with the regime than the other “good Germans” who turned the other cheek during these years of atrocities. But as John Allen writes in his biography of the future pontiff, “Ratzinger’s reading of the war omits what many people would consider its main lesson, namely, the dangers of blind obedience … many Germans failed to question, to dissent, and where necessary to fight back.”
With the country in turmoil and war approaching, in the early months of 1939 it was decided that Joseph Ratzinger would enter the minor seminary of Studienseminar St. Michael, having been “urged” by his pastor to do so “in order to be initiated systematically into the spiritual life” and begin his journey toward the priesthood. As the boarding school did not offer academic teaching as well as theological training, its members remained integrated students of the local Traunstein gymnasium and made up around one-third of the school’s population. According to Georg Ratzinger, who had already been at the seminary for four years when his younger brother joined, “it was not that unusual at all for several boys in a family to become priests and the daughters, nuns.”
Ratzinger recalls following in the footsteps of his older brother “with joy and great expectations.” But the quiet and reserved Joseph, who had “built a childhood world of [his] own,” soon discovered that he was not cut out for boarding school life—he was the youngest seminarian, aged just twelve—with sixty other boys and “had to learn how to fit into the group, how to come out of [his] solitary ways and start building a community with others by giving and receiving.” With the outbreak of war following the German invasion of Poland, on September 1, 1939, Joseph and Georg were temporarily sent home to live with their parents, so that the boarding school could be turned into a military hospital. New living quarters for the seminary were soon found, this time in a much preferable forest location, which enabled the young scholars to return to pastimes like making dams and hiking the surrounding mountains.
Ratzinger himself admits that the scenario seems absurdly idyllic, but the fact was that, for many children, “the war appeared to be almost unreal” during this period known as the Phony War. When, eventually, the stalemate was broken and the lightning German invasion of Holland, Belgium, and France, known as the Blitzkrieg, came on May 10, 1940, Ratzinger acknowledges the surprising surge of patriotic emotions, even from those opposed to nationalism, when the powers that punished Germany after the First World War were “brought to their knees in a short time” at the beginning of the Second. The elation was not shared by Joseph Senior, who “with unfailing clairvoyance saw that a victory of Hitler’s would not be a victory for Germany but rather a victory of the Antichrist that would surely usher in apocalyptic times for all believers, and not only for them.”
Joseph Senior stood his ground in opposition to the Nazis and prevented his children from being forced into the Hitler Youth for as long as legally possible, in spite of a decree by the Bavarian Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs in 1938 that stated that tuition discounts would be available only to children registered as members. He would rather that the family struggle on his meager policeman’s pension than acquiesce to the demands of such a tyrant, but when membership in the Hitler Youth was made mandatory for all boys aged fourteen and older, in 1939, as a precursor to conscription, fifteen-year-old Georg was unable to escape enrollment.
After Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and marched 4.5 million German troops into the Soviet Union, in June 1941, the need for reinforcements became urgent, and Joseph, too, was reluctantly signed up, but he followed his father’s example and refused to attend the meetings. Fortuitously, this came to the attention of his mathematics teacher, who, despite his own allegiance to the party, suggested that the boy “just go once and get the document,” but so fervent was young Joseph’s refusal that the teacher took pity on him, saying, “I understand, I’ll take care of it,” and agreed to sign him in for meetings regardless of his attendance so that he could receive a tuition discount.
Georg had no such benefactor when he turned seventeen, the legal age for conscription, and was drafted into the army. He was posted to the Sudetenland in the summer of 1942, much to the distress of his parents, and especially of fourteen-year-old Joseph, who idolized his brother. For the seminarians left behind, their days were spent watching the “huge transports [that] now began to roll in, in some cases bringing home horribly wounded soldiers,” and scanning the local newspaper for the names of schoolmates who had been killed in action.
It was not long before Joseph Ratzinger, too, received his deployment papers. A year earlier than expected, in 1943, when he was just sixteen years old, he was drafted, along with the other boys from his class born between 1926 and 1927, and posted to several batteries around Munich to serve as student reserves in the antiaircraft defense force—first protecting a Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) factory that manufactured precious airplane engines. Ratzinger remembers that his time in the army “brought many an unpleasantness, particularly for so nonmilitary a person as myself.” The students were still permitted to travel into the smoldering city three times a week to attend lessons but were horrified by the increasing devastation as the bombing of Munich intensified.
By the summer of 1944, rumors of an Allied invasion of France raised hopes that the chaos of war might soon come to an end, but it would take a further year from the D-Day landings of June 6 before Germany finally surrendered. In the meantime, Ratzinger had reached military age, so in September he was transferred to a labor detail on the border between Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, which were then German-occupied territories. The base was run by “fanatical ideologues who tyrannized [them] without respite.” Desperate SS officers hauled the students out of bed during the night and attempted to coerce the drowsy young men to become “voluntary” recruits for the weapons branch. Ratzinger and his schoolmates avoided this death sentence only by declaring that they intended to become Catholic priests. The soldiers ordered them out “with mockery and abuse,” and the students returned to their duties of trench-digging the following morning.
Despite having signed a nonaggression pact with Stalin, Hitler had decided to send 4.5 million troops to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. According to German army major Hubert Menzel, the Nazis believed that “in two years’ time, that is … [the] beginning of 1943, the En
glish would be ready, the Americans would be ready, the Russians would be ready too, and then we would have to deal with all three of them at the same time,” so they decided to remove Russia from the equation in advance of any potentially deadly alliance with the Allies.
The astonishing arrogance displayed by Germany in assuming the campaign against Russia would be short meant its forces were entirely unprepared for the resilience, skillful military tactics, and sheer volume of men Stalin’s Red Army was able to throw at the invasion, not to mention the fearsome Russian winter, nicknamed “General Winter” on account of the help it provided to the Soviet military. By September 1944, Hitler was now fighting a war of attrition, and the ever-encroaching Soviet front drew closer to Ratzinger and his comrades, who could now “hear the din of artillery in the distance.” After two months of toil, German efforts to strengthen the southwestern rampart were deemed futile, and the men were dispersed to infantry regiments around Bavaria.
When the news of the Allied invasion of Germany and Hitler’s suicide reached his barracks six months later, in May 1945, Ratzinger seized the opportunity to abandon his post in Munich and return home. The city was still heavily patrolled by officers “who had orders to shoot deserters on the spot,” but when he encountered two of them on a quiet road leading out of Munich, “they, too, had had their fill of war and did not want to become murderers.” They saw he was wearing a sling on his arm from an injury and allowed him to proceed on his way: “Comrade, you are wounded. Move on!”
Joseph and Maria were thrilled to have their youngest son return, but it was not long before American forces arrived in the village and he was forced to leave, this time as a POW. Ratzinger remembers that he had to “put back on the uniform I had already abandoned, had to raise my hands and join the steadily growing throng of war prisoners whom they were lining up on our meadow.” After three days of marching, he was interned in a POW camp alongside fifty thousand fellow German soldiers. Here they slept outside, “without a clock, without a calendar, without newspapers,” snatching from rumors what pieces of information they could about events in the world outside. The captivity was relatively brief, and on June 19, 1945, he was released and made his way home once more. He was followed a month later by Georg, and the pair returned to their studies in the seminary by autumn 1945.
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