"Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth"
Holy crap! He was a Nazi!
Until you get to this sentence, buried about halfway through:
"He joined the Hitler Youth aged 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941."
Then he didn't choose to join, he HAD to. What a non-story.
And I believe the other posters who mention the scale of membership in these youth orgs. I had a prof who was in the young fascists or whatever, in Italy, when he was like 6. Big deal.
There you have it---buried in the later part of the story.
Remember: Most of the libs in the world cannot read past the first paragraph. Their short attention span does not allow for it.
:-)
I'm not so interested in his compulsory service; I am interested in his veracity: It's all OK because he didn't fire a shot at the good guys? And this is because his gun wasn't even loaded (!) due to a "badly infected finger".
It does sound a LITTLE like "I didn't inhale" to me.
BTW, if "God's Rottweiller" finds it important to say he didn't fire at "the enemy", how come laying anti-tank mines in Hungary doesn't come under any scrutiny in this article?
Don't get me wrong... I have no moral objections to anything the vast majority of the actual Wermacht did in fighting for their country (which got screwed by the French after WWI), I just wonder if there's some obfuscation unbecoming of a Pope going on here.