Joseph Ratzinger, who turned 78 on April 16th, is the newly elected Pope. The first German in 450 years to become Pontiff, having been a Vatican official, a former Dean of the College of Cardinals, and a conservative theologian, has come under fire over the past week being branded "God's Rottweiler".

The Sun newspaper last week emblazoned it's front page with the screaming headline "From Hitler Youth ... To Papa Ratzi", raising suspicion about the new pope's years during WWII.

Joseph Ratzinger has written about his childhood during the rise of Adolf Hitler. He always acknowledged that in 1941, when the Nazis demanded compulsory membership, he joined a Hitler Youth group.

Reverend Georg Ratzinger, brother to the newly - elected Pope Benedict XVI, explained that he and Joseph, who realized early on that they wanted "a life at the altar," were raised in Bavaria, where Hitler was profusely despised.

"My parents viewed him intensely as an enemy," Ratzinger said. "From the beginning, they saw him as an enemy. They thought he was anti-Catholic and anti-Christian, anti-religion." Ratzinger's father was a police officer whose dislike of Nazi policies spurred the family to move from village to village in southeast Germany. The family eventually settled in the very Catholic town of Traunstein, near Munich.

On Nov. 9, 1938 - Kristallnacht - Jews in Traunstein were attacked and driven from town. Anyone who challenged Nazi authority was intimidated and threatened. Dachau, a concentration camp, was a few miles outside Munich.

In the world that changed before their eyes, young people were drawn to Nazi youth groups, which were often the only source of recreation in rural Bavaria, Georg Ratzinger said. Many children were attracted by sports and music into joining the organizations.

That social element never appealed to his brother, Georg said. Joseph Ratzinger was a bookish boy who shied away from sports.

Later, both Ratzingers were taken into the military service, first as youth guards, then soldiers. Neither of them could see how to escape this.

"He had no choice. You had to join or you were shot. It was a brutal regime. It was an inhuman dictatorship," Ratzinger said. "There was nothing good in it."

Neither Ratzinger fired a shot in the war, Georg Ratzinger added.

"I was a radio operator," he said, and young Joseph "didn't fight at all." His brother went from one unit to another as a guard known as a luftwaffenhelfer, "a helper to the air force." He prepared and stored cannons, bullet, guns and other supplies.

The younger Ratzinger was drafted into a forced labor unit and then the army in 1944. He deserted the army within months and then, like his brother, was held for weeks by victorious American troops as a prisoner of war.

"It was tough times," Ratzinger said.

The flurry of interest in the new pope's war history has touched a nerve in Germany, particularly in a year that marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. Franz Haselbeck, a longtime archivist for Traunstein, said some news stories seemed to ignore the reality of what a 14-year-old boy faced or could do in Nazi Germany.

"Traunstein was like all other cities here at the time, not more and not less involved with the Nazi party," Haselbeck said. "You had such repression that you couldn't lead a normal life. No one could. I don't see how any normal boy could stand against it."

"To make something of this now - when (Joseph Ratzinger) wrote about it himself years ago - really, it seems ridiculous," he added.

Georg Ratzinger has allowed himself a few judgments of his own this past news-filled week.

"Anybody who writes such a thing must need something to write," Ratzinger said, sighing about the most sensational headlines. "And anyone who writes that ... doesn't understand the times as they were."

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