Pope Benedict XVI was once a member of Hitler Youth after his church group was forced to merge with it.
Even today, membership in Nazi organizations is still not an open topic of discussion among most Germans. It was not until 2006 that famous German writer Günter Grass, often viewed as a spokesman of 'the nation's moral conscience', spoke publicly about the fact that he had been a member of the Waffen SS (even though his involvement appears to have been less than criminal; he was conscripted into the Waffen SS while barely seventeen years old and his duties were strictly military in nature). Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), on the other hand, has been open about his membership at the age of fourteen in Hitler Youth, when his church youth group was forced to merge with them. Statistically it is likely that there are many more Germans of Grass's generation (also called the "Flakhelfer-Generation") with biographies similar to his.[81] @Curionic
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