Bethlehem, West Bank  - Papal spokesman Federico Lombardi said Wednesday that Benedict XVI had been forced to enlist in the Hitler Youth - contradicting a previous denial of membership and reviving controversy over the Pope's wartime past.

"It was not his personal choice," he clarified in a news conference in Bethlehem, saying that a Nazi decree had made joining the youth movement mandatory.

Lombardi, attempting to deal with criticism in Israel of the German-born pontiff's Nazi involvement, told journalists Tuesday that "the Pope was never in the Hitler Jugend
(Hitler Youth), never never never."

But his statement contradicted Benedict's own testimony, in an interview published in the 1997 book, "Salt of the Earth."

"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," the future pope said.

On Wednesday, Lombardi tried to explain his remarks from the previous day, in which he had said that toward the end of World War II, Benedict had been compelled to join an auxiliary anti-aircraft force along with all his classmates.

"What I said, I reconfirm, is that in his life to be enlisted in the Hitler Jugend had no particular importance or place. This is not an experience that had a significance for him in any way," he told journalists in Bethlehem during a papal visit to the southern West Bank city Wednesday.

The issue of Benedict's wartime past is especially sensitive in Israel, whose relations with the Vatican are strained because of a dispute over the actions of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust, and because of Benedict's decision in January this year to readmit a Holocaust-denying bishop back into the Church.

Local and foreign media covering the papal visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories have also highlighted the issue, following Israeli disappointment at an address the pope gave Monday at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem.

Many in Israel, Holocaust survivors among them, said that given his past, the pope should have made a greater effort in his speech to express contrition for Holocaust.

Created in the 1920s the Hitler Youth was the only legal youth movement in Germany after the Nazis abolished other youth movements when they came to power in 1933.

By 1936, almost 60 per cent of German boys were members, the number rising to 90 per cent by 1939. In 1941 attendance of all boys over the age of 10 was made compulsory and only between 10 to 20 per cent managed to avoid joining the organization.(dpa)