Nazi Youth flap puts spotlight on Pope’s PR

As Pope Benedict XVI toured Jerusalem this week, his spokesperson Father Vince Lombardi said that as a young man the Pope, then Josef Ratzinger, was not a member of the Hitler Youth. “Never, never, never,” Father Vincent Lombardi said to a group of journalists. “The Pope was never in Hitler Youth.” Except he was. The Pope said so in a book: “I was registered in the Hitler Youth,” he wrote.