Madam, - In a preview of the Pope's visit to Poland, Derek Scally wrote: "It would be a highly symbolic visit for the Pope whose childhood in Nazi Germany came under scrutiny after his accession last year, in particular his brief time in the Hitler Youth when membership was compulsory" (The Irish Times, May 25th). This is quite incorrect.
Membership of the Hitler Youth was emphatically not compulsory. I went to the trouble last year of checking this important fact with the German Embassy.
Moreover before he became Pope, the then Cardinal Ratzinger indicated that his reason for joining the Hitler Youth was in order to obtain study privileges which would be useful for him during his period of priestly training.
He has in fact been quoted in an authoritative interview as saying: "Keeping out of the Hitler Youth was difficult because the tuition reduction, which I really needed, was tied to proof of attendance at the Hitler Youth. Thank goodness there was a very understanding mathematics professor. He himself was a Nazi, but an honest man."
Moreover one of the Ratzingers' neighbours in Traunstein, Elizabeth Lohner, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, says: "It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others. The Ratzingers were young and made a different choice".
I note that your Editorial of Friday, May 26th continues the idea that young Ratzinger was a passive victim in all this by describing him "as a German who was enrolled in the Hitler Youth". I think it important to confront the facts, however awkward they may be. This is especially true in the case of Pope Benedict XVI who has the presided over the issuing of venomous statements attacking gay people. They are described as: evil, disordered and a virus (the latter thanks to the Spanish Hierarchy).
In the light of the Pope's visit to Auschwitz, where many homosexual people were imprisoned, tortured, used for medical experiments on and done to death, and in the light of the memoir of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoess, who expressed astonishment at the fact that even in the camps gay people found relationships and committed themselves to each other to such an extent that when one of the pair was murdered the other invariably pined away and died, it is not acceptable to massage history in order to exonerate the Pope from a background which he certainly should explain. - Yours, etc,
Senator DAVID NORRIS, Seanad Éireann, Duboin 2.