subject by the Pope and by German church bodies, Galen himself denounced Nazi racism on multiple occasions, and he was partly responsible for the German bishops' conference condemnation of racial persecution in the 1943 pastoral letter Dekalog-Hirtenbrief. After the war, Münster rabbi Fritz Steinthal recorded Galen's support after Kristallnacht, while expressing his firm conviction as rabbi that most Catholics in his city of Münster were horrified by the pogrom and in fact feared that they would be the next victims. During a commemoration in 2012, Jewish Holocaust survivor and witness Hans Kaufmann of Münster reminded of the fact that von Galen had offered a helping hand to Steinthal after the 1938 Kristallnacht, but deplored that other Jewish victims in Münster did not receive much aid from neighbours the day after. While not as explicit and not as effective as the vocal German episcopate's 1941 protests, in September 1943, von Galen and his fellow bishops in Germany drafted another condemnation of Nazi racial persecution and ordered it to be read from all pulpits in the diocese of Münster and across Germany, therein denouncing the killing of "the innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped and mentally ill, the incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of foreign race or descent". In his history of the German Resistance, Theodore S. Hamerow characterised the resistance approach of Galen as "trying to influence the Third Reich from within". While some clergymen refused ever to feign support for the regime, in the Church's conflict with the State over ecclesiastical autonomy, the Catholic hierarchy adopted a strategy of "seeming acceptance of the Third Reich", by couching their criticisms as motivated merely by a desire to "point out mistakes that some of its overzealous followers committed" in order to strengthen the government. Thus when Bishop Galen delivered his famous 1941 denunciations of Nazi euthanasia and the lawlessness of the Gestapo, he also said that the Church had never sought the "overthrow of the Reich government". Post-war positions After the war, Galen protested against the mistreatment of the German population by Allied occupation forces. On 13 April 1945, he raised a protest with American military authorities against the mass rape of German women by Red Army soldiers as well as against the plundering of German homes, factories, research centres, firms and offices by American and British troops. In a joint interview