World View: Pope Benedict used his Polish visit to answer the rhetorical question posed by the media since his election last year: is the Pope a Catholic? Or a German?
On the plane to Warsaw, he deflected the question of a journalist with a "Hitler Youth Pope Visits Auschwitz" headline in his head, saying he was visiting Poland "above all, as a Catholic".
Four days later, at the site of the Birkenau gas chambers where 1.5 million people were executed by the Nazis, he asked for reconciliation as a "son of the German people".
The image of the German pontiff, his white robes flapping as he walked through the most notorious Nazi death camp, stirred up lively discussion in his native country and elsewhere in Europe.
Intellectuals and theologians have spent the last week poring over his final speech which, after initially positive reviews, has stirred up controversy.
After listing the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, including Jews from Poland and elsewhere in Europe as well as non-Jewish Poles, Pope Benedict mentioned the suffering of German victims of the Nazi regime.
He went on to describe the Nazis as a "ring of criminals" who "rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honour, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation".
Once in power the German people were "used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power", he said.
Sitting just a few metres from the Pope, German historian Arno Lustiger could not believe his ears.
He had always refused to visit the camp where his father was killed, relenting only when invited to attend Sunday's ceremony by his cousin, Archbishop of Paris Jean-Marie Lustiger.
"Hitler was elected; the Nazis didn't just fall out of the sky," said Lustiger to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.
Marek Edelmann, the last surviving leader of the 1944 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was largely positive about the Pope's speech.
"But when the Pope asked aloud, 'Where were you God? Why have you remained silent', I wondered, 'Where were the people?'" he said.
The head of the union of Italian Jewish communities, Claudio Morpugo, said the Pope had "oversimplified a little" the Nazi era and the Holocaust.
Rome's chief rabbi, Riccardo di Segni, called "problematic" the idea that the German people were "themselves victims and didn't belong to the persecutors".
One of the loudest German critics was the left-wing Tageszeitung, the newspaper that marked Benedict's election last year with a black front page and, in tiny print, the words "Oh Gott!"
It criticised Benedict's "fuzzy" views on the Holocaust, and his warning against the Nazi "faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful".
"Are we to interpret Auschwitz as a warning sign against atheism? As the result of modernity's distant God? Even as the result of the enlightenment and secularisation?"
The weekly newspaper Die Zeit took issue with the Pope's remark that, in trying to annihilate Judaism, the Nazis "wanted to rip out the root of Christian belief".
It asked if Benedict wanted to portray "Christianity as a victim of the Holocaust".
But La Croix in France urged a second and third reading of Benedict's speech.
"At the hour of the worst crimes of the 20th century, it seems Benedict wants to tell us, God remained silent because too many people remained silent.
"Because too many Christians, right up to the highest dignitaries of the Church, remained silent."
But, like many observers, La Croix said the speech lacked a clear reference to hatred of Jews.
"In contrast to his predecessor, he didn't want to address the role the anti-Jewish mood in Christian circles played in the increase of anti-Jewish activities," wrote La Croix.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League, went further.
"Standing at the crematoria, the world's largest Jewish cemetery, the Pope uttered not one word about anti-Semitism; not one explicit acknowledgment of Jewish lives vanquished simply because they were Jews," he said.
As if anticipating those remarks, Pope Benedict added an unscripted line to his Birkenau speech, describing the camp not just as a "place of memory" but also "a place of the Shoah".
On Wednesday, he told a papal audience: "Do not give in to the temptation of racial hatred, which is at the source of the worst forms of anti-Semitism."
In an otherwise positive analysis, the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper suggested the speech was "perhaps too theological . . . for the occasion" and suggested the "ring of criminals" reference was "a hairy formulation because it could be misunderstood as an exonerating historical statement".
Freiburg theologian Jan-Heiner Tück suggested that Pope Benedict's central message was simpler than all the analysis: God would always be absent, yesterday in Auschwitz and tomorrow elsewhere, when "buried or choked within us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism".
Little more than a year after his election, the 79-year-old pontiff carried off the strenuous four-day visit without any serious slips.
He acknowledged the legacy of his predecessor, the symbolism of his visit as a German to Poland, and the inevitability of a row over the speech during his Auschwitz visit.
"The past is never simply the past," said the Pope. "It always has something to say to us."