(19 Aug 2005) SHOTLIST
1. Wide shot exterior German President Horst Koehler''s residence
2. Pope''s car pulls up, he gets out, shakes hands with Koehler, waves to the crowd and enters villa
3. Cutaway crowd applauding
4. Pope enters villa and shakes hands with Koehler''s wife
5. Pope sits at desk and signs visitors'' book
6. Pope and Koehler seated together
7. Pope and Koehler walking through corridor
8. Pope and Koehler standing at entrance of villa
9. Cutaway photographers
10. Various Pope and Koehler walking through grounds of villa
STORYLINE
Pope Benedict XVI began the second day of his four-day trip to Germany - his first overseas journey since his election on April 19 - by meeting German President Horst Koehler at a villa in Bonn, the former west German capital.
The German-born pope''s planned visit on Friday to a synagogue - only the second by a pope - is fraught with significance in the land where Nazi terror produced the Holocaust.
Benedict, who was enrolled in the Hitler Youth and later deserted the German army at the end of World War II, is to address Germany''s oldest Jewish community in a temple rebuilt in the 1950s after it was destroyed by the Nazis in the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom.
During the synagogue visit, Benedict will go to the first floor Hall of Memory, which recalls the six million victims of the Holocaust, including
11,000 Jews from Cologne.
Then, from the synagogue pulpit, he will deliver an address after being greeted by Rabbi Netanel Teitelbaum. They will say prayers and exchange gifts in a noontime visit scheduled to last one hour.
A spat with Israel over Benedict''s failure to mention the country in a list of places hit by bombings this summer has raised the stakes for the visit.
Israel sharply criticised Benedict last month after he deplored the recent terror attacks around the world but didn''t mention a suicide bombing in Israel that killed five Israelis.
The Israeli government summoned the Vatican envoy and charged that the pope "deliberately failed" to condemn attacks against Israel.
Tensions worsened with a harshly worded Vatican statement telling Israel to stop trying to give the pope lessons on what to say.
Benedict''s visit is thus a test of interfaith relations and follows in the footsteps of his predecessor John Paul II, who made the first papal visit to a Jewish house of worship in 1986, when he visited Rome''s synagogue and did much to improve relations between Jews and the Roman Catholic Church.
Benedict''s membership in the Hitler Youth as a teenager produced some unflattering headlines after he was elected pope. In his memoirs, the pope says he was enrolled by local officials - a common occurrence at the time - and got a sympathetic teacher to help him skip the organisation''s functions.
He recounted his own disgust for the Nazis several times, including an incident in which a shouting SS officer tried to browbeat him into volunteering for dictator Adolf Hitler''s fanatical elite troops, and then heaped scorn on him when told he was studying for the priesthood.
He was drafted at 18 and underwent basic training, then risked execution by deserting and returning home a few days before the war ended.
US occupation forces took him prisoner when they discovered he had been a soldier and released him after several weeks.
He has said he saw providential design in the fact that a Polish pope who lived under Nazi occupation was succeeded by a German one.
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