JERUSALEM, (Reuters) – The Vatican had to play down Pope Benedict’s teenage membership of the Hitler Youth yesterday as Israeli disappointment at a lack of emotion in his remarks on the Holocaust dogged his tour of the Holy Land.
The speaker of the Knesset, echoing many of his compatriots, accused the German-born pope of showing detachment on Monday from Jewish suffering under the Nazis. He referred to Benedict as “a German who joined the Hitler Youth and … Hitler’s army”.
The Vatican spokesman at first flatly denied that Benedict, 82, was ever in the Nazi youth movement. But when reporters noted the pope himself spoke of his membership in a 1996 book, he revised the statement to say: “He was enrolled involuntarily into the Hitler Youth but he had no active participation.”
The pontiff, described by one Israeli newspaper columnist as coming across as “restrained, almost cold” during his visit to Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, prayed at Judaism’s Western Wall yesterday and visited Islam’s Dome of the Rock — holy sites at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He later held an open-air mass under the walls of the Old City in the Garden of Gethsemane for hundreds of Catholics who applauded Jerusalem’s patriarch for a welcome speech that spoke of the “agony of the Palestinian people” under occupation.
At Monday’s Yad Vashem ceremony, the pope spoke of the “horrific tragedy of the Shoah”, the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, but disappointed some Jewish leaders who had looked for an apology, as a German and a Catholic, for the genocide.
“He came and told us as if he were a historian, someone looking in from the sidelines, about things that should not have happened. And what can you do? He was a part of them,” Reuben Rivlin, the speaker of Israel’s parliament, told Israel Radio.
In response, Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said the pope had addressed the issue of his nationality many times, notably during a visit to the Auschwitz death camp in 2006: “He did not think that every time he has to repeat in every speech all the points about the tragedy of the Holocaust.”
Lombardi stressed, as the pope himself has done before, that Benedict’s association with the Hitler Youth was not an “active participation” with Nazism. He later served in anti-aircraft and infantry units and ended World War Two a prisoner of U.S. forces.
