John Allen Jr., journalist for the National Catholic Reporter, supplies some background on Ratzinger's World War two service in his 2002 biography, the warm and friendly-sounding "The Vatican's Enforcer of the Faith".
As a seminarian, he was briefly enrolled in the Hitler Youth in the early 1940s, though he was never a member of the Nazi party. In 1943 he was conscripted into an antiaircraft unit guarding a BMW plant outside Munich. Later Ratzinger was sent to Austria's border with Hungary to erect tank traps. After being shipped back to Bavaria, he deserted. When the war ended, he was an American prisoner of war.
Under Hitler, Ratzinger says he watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth. Their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them. The church's service to society, Ratzinger concluded, is to stand for absolute truths that function as boundary markers: Move about within these limits, but outside them lies disaster.
There are a few problems with this account. The timeline is odd, for one. According to Allen, Ratzinger deserted during in April 1944, two months before the D-Day invasion and at a time when desertion would have meant imprisonment or death. Yet somehow he managed to avoid getting caught for over a full year, and was still made a P.O.W at the war's end. The most likely explanation, given that Allen doesn't say precisely when Ratzinger deserted, is that he deserted in April of 1945, a month before V.E. Day when writing was on the wall for the Nazis and Germans were quitting the field in droves. So, his desertion can hardly be viewed as a bold act of conscience. Rather, it seems to be the actions of one saving one's skin.
Ratzinger's wartime experience makes an interesting contrast with his predecessor’s ant-Nazi activity in occupied Poland during the war and is another stain for the Church already facing so many questions about its actions during the war (wartime pontiff Pius XII is accused in some circles of turning a deaf ear to the Holocaust while the Vatican Bank is rumoured to hold 200 million Swiss francs confiscated by the Nazi puppet Ustasha government of Croatia and sent to the Vatican "for safekeeping"). However, they are neither here nor there. What's far more interesting is the second half of the quote above, which lays the ground work for Ratzinger's doctrinaire attachment to the Church's hard line stances.
Ratzinger has been outspoken in opposition to homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, contraception, the ordination of woman, the revocation of celibacy vows and ecumenical (interfaith) dialogue. He was one of the primary foes of liberation theology, the movement whose adherents believed that the church should be involved in the struggle for economic and political justice in the world (Latin American practitioners of liberation theology, such as Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero , took the side of the poor and oppressed against oppressive regimes. The Church hierarchy, led by the last Pope, sided with the elites and the military juntas in the name of fighting Communism.) Ratzinger is also a big fan of the creepy, cult-like Opus Dei sect. In short, the new Pope shares the last Pope's reactionary thinking and fetish for centralization, but lacks the warm and friendly public personae of John Paul II.
Now, let's visit the rest of that quote from Allen’s Ratzinger bio:
Later reflection on the Nazi experience also left Ratzinger with a conviction that theology must either bind itself to the church, with its creed and teaching authority, or it becomes the plaything of outside forces -- the state in a totalitarian system or secular culture in Western liberal democracies.
Here's the rub: rigid devotion to dogma is not a response to totalitarianism: it is an instrument of it. Every single totalitarian, despotic, tyrannical and fascistic regime the world has known has required the strictest ideological rigidity possible in order to succeed. The Nazis were every bit as convinced of the absolute truths of their cause as Ratzinger is of his. Historically, absolute conviction and belief in the cause (whatever it may be) is what enabled people to herd other humans into gas chambers in Germany, slaughter political opponents in Stalinist Russia, denounce parents and teachers in Maoist China and on and on. And don't even get me started on the Spanish Inquisition.
I guess all of that is just window dressing. I think the real upshot of the election of another rigid ideologue to the Papacy is that the Catholic Church will continue to slide into irrelevance. A reformist Pope willing to bring the Church into the 21st (hell: 2oth) Century could have made the institution meaningful again to the millions of people who have turned away over the years precisely because of the rigidity that Ratzinger stands for. However, one must consider that, in any human institution, corruption will grow directly in proportion to the power the institution wields, the wealth it holds and the duration of its existence. Therefore, an ancient institution like the Catholic Church would be the most corrupt of all. It's pretty clear that behind the opulence and glitter, the piety and solemn rituals, the Vatican is merely a hierarchy of old men desperately clinging to whatever vestiges of power they have here on earth. I doubt there's anyone who could change that.
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