After the end of
World War II in 1945,
Pope Pius XII appointed Muench in 1946 as apostolic visitor to the allied-occupied sections of defeated Germany. In Fargo, Auxiliary Bishop
Leo Ferdinand Dworschak was elected in 1947 to serve as the
apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Fargo in Muench's absence. From 1946 to 1949, Muench served as
military vicar delegate of the
United States Armed Forces, and in 1949 was named regent of the
nunciature in Germany. Muench also served as "liaison consultant for religious affairs to the military governor", appointed by Secretary of War
Robert P. Patterson. The German nunciature had been vacant since the death of Archbishop
Cesare Orsenigo in 1946. Muench assumed the
de facto role of nuncio before he received the title on March 6, 1951.
One World in Charity Muench's
pastoral letter One World In Charity was published in installments (in the U.S. first in January 1946, and in occupied Germany one year later). 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. It 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.
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".
One World was cited by prison guard Josef Hering and other war criminals in their own writings. 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 of his business to a Polish 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". 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
expelled from their home nations at the end of the war. Muench felt that their suffering 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 "dangerously thin ice". According to Phayer, it was Muench's discretion that "saved the Vatican from becoming publicly associated with former Nazis". Muench wrote: "I have not dared to advise the Holy See to intervene, especially if such intervention would eventually become public". Muench often preferred to work behind the scenes; for example, a letter from one of Muench's secretaries provided Reverend Franz Lovenstein the contact information he had requested "with the understanding, of course, that you are not to use his name in connection with any letters or briefs that will be sent to those gentlemen". For example, in the case of
Hans Eisele, the former SS doctor convicted of experimentation on prisoners, there is some evidence that Muench's intervention with General Clay in the summer of 1948 resulted in the commutation of Eisele's execution and his eventual release in 1952. ==Nunciature (1951–1959)==