Pope’s Wartime Past Becomes an Issue on Israel Trip
By RACHEL DONADIO
May 13, 2009
JERUSALEM — The Vatican sought on Tuesday to defend Pope Benedict XVI against criticism of his speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial the day before.
But as has become familiar in Benedict’s four years as pope, the attempt at media relations stumbled, in a particularly awkward way for a trip to Israel: the German pope’s spokesman first said that Benedict “never, never, never” had belonged to the Hitler Youth but later had to issue a retraction.
The spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was working to counter both criticism of the speech — blasted in the press here as at best a bland missed moment for a German pope who experienced the Holocaust firsthand — and hostility from some in Israel to the pope himself.
Even before the pope spoke on Monday, the day he arrived in Israel, a cartoon in the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot showed him at Yad Vashem looking at a photo of a group of Hitler Youth and saying, “Hey, that’s me.”
But in saying that the pope, then known as Joseph Ratzinger, had never served in the Hitler Youth, Father Lombardi contradicted the statements from the pope himself, who never hid what he and others have said was his unwilling conscription.
Indeed, in a book-length interview with the journalist Peter Seewald in 1997, Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, said, “As a seminarian, I was registered in the Hitler Youth.” He added, “As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back.”
Reared in a Catholic family in Bavaria, where the church was seen in many ways as a bulwark against Nazism, Benedict was later drafted into the German Army, where he served in an antiaircraft unit.
Father Lombardi quickly changed course, but that only served to complicate the issue of Benedict’s wartime record and underscore what critics and supporters alike say is the Vatican’s problematic public relations apparatus, which does not seem to have improved despite repeated missteps. He said that he had opened the issue of the pope’s wartime past — which in most minds was long settled in Benedict’s favor — to counter negative accounts, especially in the Israeli press, that Benedict was an enthusiastic Nazi in his youth.
“This fact of the Hitler Youth had no role in his life and in his personality,” Father Lombardi said.
The issue resonated strongly, given that Benedict’s first visit to the Holy Land as pope came four months after he provoked outrage by revoking the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, one of whom, a Briton, Richard Williamson, has denied the scope of the Holocaust. Benedict later condemned anti-Semitism and said he had not been aware of the bishop’s views.
The episode distracted from Benedict’s visits on Tuesday to place a prayer in the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, and to the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine where the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven.
It also revealed the extent of the Vatican’s defensiveness over criticism of Benedict’s speech on Monday, when he mused on memory and expressed the “deep compassion” of the Roman Catholic Church over the “millions of Jews killed” in the Holocaust but never used the word German or Nazi. Nor did he speak about his own experiences, though many said they were waiting to hear about them.
In a scathing front-page editorial in Haaretz, a columnist, Tom Segev, wrote: “Benedict chose to phrase even the most universal lessons of the Holocaust in abstract terms. These may still have a place in the lecture hall of a German theology professor, but in the Internet age, they are little more than empty banalities.”
Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of Israel’s Parliament, said: “The pope spoke like a historian, as somebody observing from the sidelines, about things that shouldn’t happen. But what can you do? He was part of them.”
Even the director of the museum expressed disappointment.
The issue is also delicate because the Vatican and Israel, long at odds over the wartime legacy of Pius XII, who was pope from 1939 until 1958, agreed that Benedict would enter the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem and not the museum because it had a contentious plaque criticizing Pope Pius XII for not doing enough to help save Jews during the Holocaust.
In light of this, many were hoping for a stronger statement from Benedict at Yad Vashem.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Father Lombardi tried to set the record straight, pointing out other times when Benedict had addressed the Holocaust. “Maybe sometimes he feels he was not well understood,” he said. “I feel the same.”
Visiting Auschwitz as pope in 2006, Benedict called himself “a son of the German people.” (He also drew criticism from his description of the Nazis as “a ring of criminals” who had “used and abused” the German people, phrases that seemed to reduce the scope of German culpability.)
In 2005, on one of his first trips as pope, he visited the Cologne synagogue and marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, “in which millions of Jews — men, women and children — were put to death in the gas chambers and ovens.”
On Thursday, Father Lombardi said: “They expect him every time to repeat. This is not possible.”
Yet to some, if there was ever a time to repeat, his visit to Yad Vashem was it.
“It shows a lack of emotional understanding on the need to say certain things in certain places even if you’ve said them before,” said Rabbi David Rosen, international director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee and one of the Vatican’s main Jewish interlocutors.
On Wednesday, Benedict is scheduled to travel to Bethlehem, where he will celebrate Mass in Manger Square, meet the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and visit the Aida refugee camp. On Thursday, he will celebrate Mass in Nazareth, before returning to Rome on Friday.