A THREAT bandied about during the Second World War in Pope Benedict XVI’s seemingly idyllic Bavarian home town was: “Shut up, or you’ll end up in Dachau!”

The concentration camp was no secret in Traunstein and its lurking presence provides a key to understanding the man who now occupies the throne of St Peter. Just as Pope John Paul II’s moral compass was forged in Cracow, with its proximity to Auschwitz and also after the war to the communist steel-town Nowa Huta, so Pope Benedict’s compass was set by Traunstein and its Nazi past.

For decent Germans it was a time of moral ambivalence — an apparent choice between risking death by opposing the regime or keeping quiet. “Our father was a bitter enemy of the Nazis because he believed they were in conflict with our faith,” the Pope’s brother, Georg, 81, said. Both were anxious that their father might speak out and “land up in Dachau”.

Small wonder, then, that in later life Cardinal Ratzinger so robustly embraced the moral certainties of his faith, and that he should have been an architect of Pope John Paul’s conciliation with the Jewish faith.

Dachau really was everywhere. It had 150 sub-camps across Bavaria for slave labourers, who kept the arms factories running. One was virtually at the gates of Traunstein; a heavily guarded barracks that housed 700 Dachau prisoners to repair BMW aircraft engines. Prisoners keeled over from hunger and overwork. Some are buried under modest crosses in the local cemetery.

The sub-camp was at Trostberg, about 20 kilometres (12½ miles) north of Traunstein. The main Dachau camp was 100 kilometres away on the fringe of Munich. In May 1945 a ragamuffin column of camp victims was herded through Traunstein by SS officers yelling orders and beating stragglers. Police were told to keep the townspeople at a distance.

Friedbert Mühldorfer, a local historian, said that a baker’s wife handed rolls to the prisoners, but “they also went past people who looked away in shame to avoid the cruel truth”. Other Germans “laughed mockingly and eagerly reported to the SS any attempt by prisoners to break ranks”.

The prisoners were marched past rolling green pasture land. Four miles away, in the village of Surberg, 66 of them — mainly Hungarian and Polish Jews — were executed. Yesterday building workers erected a Star of David to balance the unmarked Christian crosses that denote the spot.

Elderly locals do not know whether young Joseph Ratzinger — 18 when the war ended — witnessed any of this Nazi-inflicted misery, and his memoirs are vague. He had effectively deserted his army unit by the time the camp prisoners were marched through town. “At the end of April or the beginning of May — I don’t remember precisely — I decided to go home,” he has written.

It seems that he spent most of the war buried in his books. In 1944, when his brother was sent as a radio operator to the Italian front, he records: “Despite the grimness of the historical situation, I was facing a good year at home and at the grammar school in Traunstein. The Greek and Latin classes filled me with enthusiasm.”

Yet as he walked to school through Traunstein he must have seen the signs of creeping persecution. A Nazi banner read: “Don’t Buy from Jews.”

There was in fact only one Jewish businessman in town — the well-respected cattle merchant Willi Holzer. “For a while everyone continued to trade with him,” Herr Mühldorfer said. Then he was deported and murdered.

A Jewish doctor was banned. One Jewish woman was told to divorce her “Aryan” husband. She did so and later committed suicide. Kurt Israel Fischl, 23, went on holiday to nearby Berchtesgaden, had a romance with an Aryan girl and was arrested on his return. He was jailed for two years then sent to Auschwitz. He died in 1943.

There were flickers of protest. Gestapo reports mention anti-Hitler graffiti scrawled on buildings. Townsfolk shopped neighbours for listening to the BBC. When Joseph Stelzle, a priest, was arrested for calling Hitler a false prophet, the church came to his aid: no bells were rung as long as he stayed in jail. Father Stelzle — parish priest at St Oswald’s Church, where the Pope was ordained — was freed after 15 days.

Joseph Ratzinger’s Traunstein was a moral maze and he reacted with caution, minding his tongue. It was partly the caution of poverty, but also the innate caution of someone with inner conviction living in a hostile environment.

The Traunstein lesson was perhaps that the Church should keep its distance from political ideologies. In an ethically confused world, the terms of faith have to be clearly defined.

That — not a Hitler Youth uniform — is what Traunstein bequeathed to Benedict XVI.

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