January 1946, and in occupied Germany one year later). The 10,200 word letter was read from the diocese of Fargo's pulpits weekly on the five Sundays between Shrove Tuesday and Passion Sunday, and then translated into German and printed first in German language newspapers in the United States. Truncated versions of One World, focusing on Muench's comments about the collective guilt of German Catholics and the equation of the Nazis and the allied occupation authorities began to circulate in Germany in early 1947, and spread rapidly due to grassroots distribution (authorized or unauthorized) and quotation in German newspapers. One World appeared in both religious and secular publications alongside statements denying Germans' complicity in the Holocaust, especially the concept of collective guilt. Muench received several letters from German Catholics commenting on One World; they regarded him as one who understood German "suffering" and believed him to be of German descent.One World referred to the Allied authorities as "other Hitlers in disguise, who would make of [the German] nation a crawling [Bergen-]Belsen. One World argued that responsibility for the Holocaust lay only with a very few war criminals who had "revived the Mosaic idea of an eye for an eye". According to Brown-Fleming, Muench's sympathies in his writing matched his actions as one of the most active participants in the Vatican's "postwar clemency campaign on behalf of convicted war criminals". In particular, he spoke against what he perceived to be the mistreatment of high-ranking prisoners such as Konstantin von Neurath, Erich Raeder, Karl Dönitz, Walther Funk, Baldur von Schirach, Albert Speer, and Rudolf Hess. He wrote that their treatment was "another terrible blotch on our record for decent, humane treatment of war criminals". One World was cited by Josef Hering and other war criminals in their own writings. Relationship with Jews In at least four instances, Muench became involved in restitution disputes between Catholic Germans and Jews regarding property seized during the war; in each instance, Muench sided with the German Catholics, contacting highly placed German and American officials on their behalf. Muench wrote in a September 1946 letter that "some of these gents exploit the fact that they were in concentration camps for their own benefit, although some were there because of an unsavory past". In one restitution case, where a distant relative of Muench had been sentenced by a military court to a fine of 2,000 marks and the return