I don't fault people for having as warped a perspective on Nazi and German history as they do. Not everyone has had the benefit of living in Berlin and among Germans as I have. Still, in the interest of intellectual clarity and rigor, people should probably take a couple of seconds before getting uppity with the word Nazi. Ratzinger deserves crictism on a number of counts, and his past warrants the scrutiny it will no doubt receive. But the attempts to paint him with a Nazi brush--as the Brit tabloids did today--is terribly prejudicial, and as a staunch advocate of historical accuracy and fairness, I feel compelled to issue a quick defense of both Germany and Ratzinger.
First, membership in the Nazi Youth, as others have noted, was compulsory for young men of Ratzinger's age and time. Using his mere membership in the organization as grounds for villification would be akin to blaming a student in Beijing for being a Communist. The circumstances of his birth and upbringing were decided for him, and absent his agency, his mere membership in the Hitler Youth cannot be a source of criticism.
With this in mind, the question we should be asking is, What did he do under the circumstances of his upbringing? When the latter question is asked, the evidence tilts in his favor, as he deserted the German armed forces at a time when men were summarily executed for doing so. This hardly amounts to exculpatory evidence, but the frothing animus of news reports and some commentary on dKOS suggests that people still have a certain myopia when it comes to German history.
The Germans will never get a free pass from me. (Nor, for that matter, will they issue one to themselves.) But the term Nazi has undergone such debasement, and the process of moral condemnation has seen so much dilution, that one fears our ability to accurately diagnose evil when it actually does arise. Most Germans today are not even remotely Nazi-esque. Even contemporary xenophobes and anti-Semites nurture a hatred of a profoundly different character than its forebears. Most Germans, and that includes people associated with the Third Reich, many of whom are current government officials and diplomats, are nonetheless NOT Nazis. Many of them were very bad people and have managed to weasel their way back into polite society, but many are innocent.
Yet, it is precisely our willingness to scream Nazi that has led to our complacency elsewhere. Thanks to this cartoon-ization of Nazi imagery and rhetoric, nothing shy of the ashes of an incenerated child landing on Kofi Annan's nose will get us to fight what's happening in Darfur. [Annan was also Undersecretary for Peacekeeping during the Rwanda episode for all you Kofi and UN lovers.] Whereas the Holocaust should have been the clarion to permanently rouse us to vigilance, it has instead made us slothful and slow in the face of evil.
All this said, there are significant practical reasons for drawing a deeper breath before screaming Nazi. Try and hold off when talking about Ratzinger.