The Vatican blundered into a fresh public relations fiasco on Tuesday after seeking to rewrite the biography of Pope Benedict XVI by denying that he was ever a member of the Hitler Youth.The muddle overshadowed the second day of the Pope's visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, when he visited sacred sites around Jerusalem and sought to bridge the historic divide between Catholicism and Judaism.
Even though the 82-year-old German pontiff has admitted in numerous interviews that he was drafted unwillingly into the Nazi youth movement towards the end of the war, his spokesman came up with another version.
"The Pope was never in the Hitler Youth, never, never, never,'' Father Federico Lombardi, chief spokesman for the Pope, told a press conference in Jerusalem.
Father Lombardi said the Pope had served in the anti-aircraft artillery corps but this did not mean that he was a member of the Hitler Youth.
He seemed to be trying to draw a distinction between pro-Nazi Germans who volunteered for the Hitler Youth and young men who were forced to join the anti-aircraft unit but who, he claimed, were not necessarily in the Hitler Youth.
But the pontiff's spokesman's comments contradict statements the pope, himself, has made, admitting that he was a member of the Hitler Youth.
In the 1996 book "Salt of the Earth", the Pope told Peter Seewald, a German journalist: "At first we weren't, but when the compulsory Hitler Youth was introduced in 1941, my brother was obliged to join. I was still too young, but later, as a seminarian, I was registered in the HY. As soon as I was out of the seminary I never went back."
Father Lombardi's comments came in response to a fairly chill response in Israel to the Pope's choice of language over the Holocaust during the first day of his trip to Israel.
Reuven Rivlin, the Israeli parliamentary speaker, said the Pope should have acknowledged his role as a member of the German armed forces.
"He came and told us as if he were a historian, someone looking in from the sidelines, about things that should not have happened,'' Mr Rivlin said. "He was a part of them.''
The puzzling claim about the Pope's membership of the Hitler Youth is the Vatican's third stumble this year.
In January he caused outrage when he lifted the excommunication of a renegade British Catholic bishop, Richard Williamson, who denied the extent of the Holocaust.
Two months later he was criticised by governments, NGOs and health experts when he said during his first papal visit to Africa that condoms can "aggravate" the Aids crisis.
The Pope began the day with a visit to two of the holiest Muslim and Jewish sites in Jerusalem, where he delivered messages of peace.
In keeping with tradition, he slipped a folded piece of paper bearing a prayer between the ancient stones of the Western Wall, revered by Jews as one of their most sacred shrines.
According to the Vatican, the prayer referred to "Jerusalem, City of Peace, spiritual home to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike'' and asked God to end war.
He was then became the first pontiff to enter the Dome of the Rock mosque, where the Prophet Mohammed is believed to have ascended into heaven.
After meeting Israel's two chief rabbis, Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger, the Pope sought to send a signal of rapprochement when he said that the Catholic church was "irrevocably committed'' to reconciliation with Jews, tacitly admitting that a gap continues to exist between the two sides.
The first mass of his visit to Israel was held amid tight security in the Kidron Valley, yards from the Garden of Gethsemane where, it is believed, Jesus was betrayed.
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