seemed to be guarding us." 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..." Ratzinger was briefly interned in a POW camp near Ulm and was released on 19 June 1945. He and another young man began to walk the home but got a lift to Traunstein in a milk truck. The family was reunited when his brother, Georg, returned after being released from a POW camp in Italy. Priestly formation (1946–1951) 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 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). By the end of his studies, he was drawn more to the active Saint Augustine than to Thomas Aquinas, and among the scholastics he was more interested in Saint Bonaventure. On 29 June 1951, the brothers, along with other seminarians from Traunstein seminary, were ordained in Freising by Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich. His dissertation (1953) was on Augustine, entitled "The People and the House of God in Augustine's Doctrine of the Church", and his Habilitationsschrift (a dissertation which serves as qualification for a professorship) was on Bonaventure. It was completed in 1957 and he became a professor of Freising college in 1958. See also References Notes Times Online (UK) 17 April 2005 ("Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth") International Herald Tribune 22 April 2005. "A boy's dreams lead from a village to the Vatican" (reprinted from The New York Times) The New York Times, 21 April 2005. "A Future Pope Is Recalled: A Lover of Cats and Mozart, Dazzled by Church as a Boy" National Catholic Reporter, 14 October 2005. "Anti-Nazi Prelate