POPE BENEDICT XVI: As a young man in Bavaria, Pope Benedict may have been inspired by those who stood against the Nazis, people such as Trauenstein's parish priest, reports Derek Scally
Traunstein has a story familiar to many small German towns where the Nazis strangled the political opposition, terrorised Jewish families out of town, and took over local newspapers and schools to control information and education.
In the middle of this was the young Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, his growing interest in the Catholic Church during his school years putting him at odds with the Nazi regime and state school he attended.
"Everyone in Traunstein was a member of the NSDAP [ the Nazi Party] - from the businessman who recognised the signs of the times and shamelessly took advantage, to the convinced Nazi functionaries, to the anxious followers who simply were worried about missing out," writes Friedbert Mühldorfer in his history of the town from 1933-45.
The town had its resistance fighters too. But, as he also points out, only the large acts of resistance are documented, with smaller, private acts of resistance long forgotten.
The church and the Bavarian People's Party (BVP) were the core of organised resistance in Traunstein, making them a prime Nazi target.
The BVP was banned and church leaders silenced, through intimidation as well as the Concordat of 1933 obliging Catholic priests to recognise the Nazi regime and give up all political work.
Fr Joseph Stelzle, the parish priest of Traunstein, resisted Nazi attempts to silence him. He told parishioners on January 6th, 1934: "Christ was born and died for all of us. For the whites, blacks and yellows. Today there are movements that don't want to accept this. Protect yourself from these false prophets!"
That homily cost Fr Stelzle 15 days in prison, "for his own security because of the outrage national socialist-oriented population", according to police files. He was forced to leave town but returned a few months later. Hundreds of people turned out to greet him, and to demand he stay, which he did until his death.
Ratzinger's school days in Traunstein came as the Catholic church and the Nazis fought over control of school ideology and doctrine.
He was, for a time, a boarder at a Catholic presbytery, which was closed in 1941 but soon reopened during a church-state spat. He attended Traunstein's one-time Catholic school which was forcibly "nationalised" in 1941, in the face of huge protest in Traunstein.
Themes in the new curriculum studied by Ratzinger included "eternal struggle as life principle", "war enthusiasm", "self-confidence as master race" and "unyielding rigour".
In 1943 Ratzinger was removed from school, completed a Luftwaffehelfer flak assistant training in Munich and was dispatched to a BMW aircraft engine factory in Trostberg, near Traunstein. The production had been moved from Munich because of excessive bombing. It was the job of the flak assistants to protect the factory from Allied air strikes.
The factory was populated by hundreds of slave labourers from Dachau in striped concentration camp uniforms. They worked in the halls and underground works which were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by SS officers. They were also engaged in the town of Traunstein.
Labourers who were "no longer capable of work" were shipped back to Dachau.
On May 3rd, 1945, hundreds of Hungarian and Polish Jews evacuated from Flossenbürg concentration camp were marched through Traunstein - past the houses, the shops, the bakery - on the way to a death camp of Ebensee near Salzburg. "Some looked away from the skeletal figures, others mocked the prisoners," writes historian Friedbert Mühldorfer. SS officers later shot dead 66 of the prisoners just outside Traunstein, hours before American soldiers marched in.
No one in Traunstein seems to remember any Jews in the town. In the town information centre, the local historian who does walking tours says there were never any Jews here.
Just weeks after Hitler came to power, however, the Chiemgau-Boten local newspaper was calling for a boycott of Jewish businesses. A banner in the town square on April 1st, 1933, read: "Don't buy from Jews - he'll run you from your house and land."
On Kristallnacht, November 9th, 1938, around 40 "outraged" Traunsteiners went around town smashing windows of their Jewish neighbours.
On November 12th, 1938, Chiemgau-Bote announced: "The National Socialist population can ascertain with satisfaction that our region is now Jew free."
The Ratzinger family moved to Traunstein in 1937. The headmaster of St Michael's seminary, where Ratzinger lived during the early years of the war, says this shielded him from the worst of the Nazi school system.
