Haaretz
Iyar 11, 5765
VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI, in
his first major address about the Nazi era in his native Germany, on
Thursday condemned "the genocide of the Jews," and said humanity must
never be allowed to forget or repeat such atrocious
crimes.
Speaking exactly one month after his election, the former
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger also quoted from a famous phrase of
reconciliation between German and Polish Catholic bishops issued in the
1960s: "We forgive and we seek forgiveness."
Benedict, 78, served
briefly in the Hitler Youth during the war when membership of the Nazi
paramilitary organization was compulsory. But he was never a member of the
Nazi party and his family opposed Hitler's regime.
He made his
address in the Vatican after a screening of a new, made-for-television
film on the life of his predecessor John Paul II, whose native Poland was
the site of the most notorious of the Nazi death camps.
He spoke of
"the repression of the Polish people and the genocide of the Jews",
branding both "atrocious crimes that show everyone the evil that the Nazi
ideology had within it." The Nazi period illustrated the "abysses of
wickedness that can hide in the human soul", he said.
"Remembering
such aberrations can only prompt in every upright person the commitment to
do everything in their power so that episodes of such inhuman barbarism
are never repeated."
Shortly after his election on April 19,
Benedict sent a message to Rome's Jewish community pledging to follow in
John Paul's path of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation.
In his address
on Thursday night, Benedict said all of humanity was seriously threatened
each time a totalitarian regime trampled on an individual.
"As time
passes, memories should not be allowed to pale," he said, speaking in
Italian.
"They must instead serve as a stern lesson for our and
future generations. We have the duty to remind people, especially young
people, what levels of unheard of violence the contempt for man and the
violation of his rights can reach," he added.
Benedict, who will
travel to Germany in August, said he believed it was "part of the divine
plan of providence" that two successive popes - John Paul and himself -
had lived through the horrors of World War Two on opposite sides of the
same border.
Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, which
started the war.
The film the Pope saw in the Vatican's vast
audience hall - "Karol --the man who became pope," tells of John Paul's
early days and his life until he became Pontiff in 1978.
John Paul,
who died on April 2, was the first pontiff to visit a synagogue and the
first to visit Nazi death camps. He led the Vatican to diplomatic
relations with Israel and repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism as a sin
against God.