"The Worst Enemies of a Better Germany": Postwar Antisemitism among Catholic Clergy and U.S. Occupation Forces

Between 1946 and 1959, Vatican liaison to Germany Aloisius Cardinal Muench received tens of thousands of letters from German and American Roman Catholics. Of these, approximately one hundred letters—written by lay Catholics, priests, and prelates in the United States or by Catholics in the U.S. Army and military government—commented directly on the Holocaust, its survivors, and Jewish refugees in Germany or already in the United States. In addition, Cardinal Muench kept a diary throughout his stay. In it, he recorded several dozen private conversations with American military officers and with ecclesiastical officials regarding Jews specifically. Muench's diary entries offer an unusually clear window on antisemitic attitudes—his own and others'—in the American occupation zone of Germany and back home in the United States.