I can understand why the Pope would be uncomfortable about his past, but this is ridiculous :

The Vatican defended Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday as a man of strong anti-Nazi credentials, and backtracked over an earlier claim that he had never been a member of the Hitler Youth in his native Germany, which had contradicted statements by the pontiff himself.

A Vatican spokesman at first flatly denied that Benedict, 82, was ever in the Nazi youth movement. But when reporters noted the pope himself spoke of his membership in a 1996 book, he revised the statement to say: “He was enrolled involuntarily into the Hitler Youth but he had no active participation.”
. . .

The Vatican spokesman made a distinction between convinced Hitler Youth activists and members of the anti-aircraft units, omitting the category of involuntary Hitler Youth members to which Benedict has been quoted as saying he belonged.

“The Hitler Youth was a corps of volunteers, fanatically, ideologically for the Nazis,” Lombardi said.

The anti-aircraft auxiliary corps the pope was enrolled in towards the end of the war “had absolutely nothing to do with the Hitler Youth and the Nazis and Nazi ideology”, he added.

Yeah, the Pope used to be a Nazi, but he wasn’t a Nazi-Nazi. He was more like one of those loveable, doesn’t hate the Jews, Hogan’s Heroes sorta Nazis. And yeah… he was part of a German anti-aircraft unit during WW2, but that was completely unrelated to the Nazis. They were just shooting down Allied planes on their own, independent of what Hitler was doing, and they had no idea there was a war going on.