Via Amy Welborn:
The German and Italian press have been covering a side-story to Günter Grass's service in the Waffen-SS. Apparently he passed his time in a POW camp hanging out with Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI. From a collection of translated Italian news articles on the story:
Grass, who would become an active pacifist, was wounded in combat in 1945, then captured by the Americans and kept in a POW camp."Together with other 17-year-olds," he remembers, "I was in the lager of Bad Aibling, where some 100,000 POWs were interned without a roof, and when it rained, some of us crouched together in a hole we had dug in the ground over which we stretched a tarp to protect us from the rain."
"One of my fellow POWs was named Joseph, he was very Catholic, and often spouted quotations in Latin. We became friends and we played dice together, because I managed to get a dice jar in the lager. To pass the time, we chatted and speculated about the future, as boys often love to do. I wanted to become an artist, while he wanted to enter into the service of the Church. He gave me the impression of being a bit awkward, but he was a most likeable type. This is a beautiful story, don't you think?"