Originally Posted by
TheAbominatrix
Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, in Marktl Am Inn, Germany. He was the son of a police officer who came from a traditional family of farmers in Lower Bavaria, according to his Vatican biography. Bavaria remains a heavily Catholic region of Germany.
He spent his adolescent years in Traunstein, near the Austrian border, when the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler controlled Germany.
In his memoirs, Ratzinger wrote that school officials enrolled him in the Hitler Youth movement against his will when he was 14 in 1941.
Membership was compulsory and the officials enrolled his entire class, acting on orders from the Nazi regime, Allen said. Ratzinger said he was soon let out because of his studies for the priesthood.
According to Allen, his family was quietly strongly anti-Nazi, and his father took a series of less significant jobs to stay away from what was happening in Nazi Germany.
During World War II, Ratzinger was drafted into army in 1943, serving in an anti-aircraft unit that tracked Allied bombing raids.
He deserted in the waning months of the war in 1945 and returned to Traunstein, where he was taken prisoner by U.S. troops.
In June 1945, he was released from a POW camp and returned home, this time hitching a ride on a milk truck.
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