of his business to a Warsaw Jew, Muench wrote "a lot of hardship and injustice comes about because of [restitution resulting from] denazification". Muench was also an opponent of interreligious dialogue efforts that included Jews, opposing the organization of chapters of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) and the International Conference of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), among others, in occupied Germany. In a 1948 letter to Carl Zietlow, a Minnesotan Protestant pastor of the NCCJ, Muench described the organization as unneeded because: "regarding anti-Semitism" he had "found very little of it". Historian Paul Weindling has described Muench as having "made efforts to downplay war crimes by distrusting Holocaust survivors as exaggerating Nazi crimes", part of a broader worldview that stated that "Germans were victims: Jews, Slavs and communists were exaggerating crimes against them to extricate resources". According to Phayer, for Muench as well as Pius XII, the "priority was not the survivors of the Holocaust, but the situation of the German Catholic refugees in Eastern Europe who had been driven from their homes at the end of the war. Bishop Muench felt that their lot was comparable to that of the Jews during the Holocaust". Clemency for war crimes Along with other German and American clerics, such as Johann Neuhausler, auxiliary bishop of Munich, Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, Muench was "in close contact with occupation authorities, other religious leaders, and the convicted war criminals themselves" regarding the campaign for clemency for Nazi war criminals. In February 1950, Pius XII instructed Muench to write a letter in support of clemency for some convicted German war criminals to General Thomas Hardy, the head of the U.S. Army European Command, who had the final word on all clemency decisions; with his new appointment as papal regent, Muench was to speak as a direct representative of the pope. In his diary, Muench made it clear that he viewed as "questionable" the sentences of war criminals who had not been directly involved in medical experimentation or other extreme acts at concentration camps or the deportation of people for slave labor. Prior to this, Muench had frequently become involved in individual clemency cases, but took care not to attract undue attention or publicity to the Vatican. As the Vatican urged Muench to press harder against the U.S. authorities, Muench wrote to Undersecretary Montini (future Pope Paul VI) warning him that Rome was on