Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger was born on 16 April (Holy Saturday) 1927 at 11 Schulstrasse, his parents' home in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria and baptised on the same day.

"[1] According to the International Herald Tribune, these relocations were directly related to Joseph Ratzinger Sr.'s continued resistance to Nazism, which resulted in demotions and transfers.

Their sister Maria, born in 1921, managed Joseph's household until her death in 1991, fulfilling a promise she made to their parents to take care of her brothers.

[5] An even earlier incident occurred in 1932, when Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, visited the small town in which the Ratzinger family lived, arriving in a black limousine.

Following the seminary closure he continued required attendance with the Hitler Youth to avoid financial penalties in the Gymnasium tuition fees.

"[5] After Joseph Ratzinger was elected pontiff in 2005, following the death of Pope John Paul II, a neighbor from Traunstein, Elizabeth Lohner, then 84 years old, was quoted in the 17 April 2005 edition of The Times ("Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth"), asserting, "[I]t was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others.

From Innsbruck their unit went to Gilching to protect the jet fighter base and to attack Allied bombers as they massed to begin their runs towards Munich.

After three weeks passed, he was drafted into the German army at Munich and assigned to the infantry barracks in the center of Traunstein, the city near which his family lived.

[7] Soon after, two SS members were given shelter at the Ratzinger family house, and they began to make enquiries about the presence there of a young man of military age.

"[8] When the Americans arrived in the village, "I was identified as a soldier, had to put back on the uniform I had already abandoned, had to raise my hands and join the steadily growing throng of war prisoners whom they were lining up on our meadow.

It especially cut my good mother's heart to see her boy and the rest of the defeated army standing there, exposed to an uncertain fate..."[8] Ratzinger was briefly interned in a POW camp near Ulm and was released on 19 June 1945.

Following repatriation in 1945, both Ratzinger brothers entered a Catholic seminary in Freising, and later studied at the Herzogliches Georgianum of the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.

According to an interview with Peter Seewald, Ratzinger and his fellow students were particularly influenced by the works of Gertrud von Le Fort, Ernst Wiechert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Elisabeth Langgässer, Theodor Steinbüchel, Martin Heidegger[10] and Karl Jaspers.

The young Ratzinger saw the last three in particular as a break with the dominance of neo-Kantianism, with the key work being Steinbüchel's Die Wende des Denkens (The Change in Thinking).