Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 32, Number 2 (Summer 2026)
Research Note: “Between Race and Religion: U.S. Catholics and the Plight of ‘Non-Aryan’ Refugees from Nazism”
By Timothy Turnquist, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
I recently defended my History dissertation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. After many conversations about the Catholic Church and its responses to the Nazi regime and racial antisemitism with my Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Gerald Steinacher, I decided to investigate the U.S. Catholic Church and its aid work for “non-Aryan” refugees from Nazism. Incredibly, at my defense, surviving Catholic refugees or their children and grandchildren attended. Other refugees offered feedback on dissertation chapters. My genealogical investigation into refugees assisted by U.S. Catholics continues and has led to numerous discoveries, uncovering family stories long buried by time and ruptures with the past. It has illuminated how Nazi racial laws targeted people who identified as Jewish, but also entangled thousands of Christians because of their Jewish ancestry. The experiences of these so-called “non-Aryan” Christians were often misunderstood at the time and remain obscure today. Aid organizations, especially the U.S. bishop-led National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), struggled to respond to this unprecedented phenomenon outside historical immigration channels.
My dissertation claims that while the U.S. Church’s efforts to assist Catholic refugees were modest, success and significance are not the same. Nazi antisemitism ensnared the transnational Church and its refugees in a crisis in which the lines between “race” and religion blurred on both sides of the Atlantic. Overall, religious aid organizations and their assistance to “non-Aryan” refugees lie at the intersection of Church and Holocaust history, (im)migration studies, and the history of race. The focus on Catholic-Jewish relations in the interwar and wartime period obscures the challenges that Christian churches faced in providing pastoral care, financial support, and emigration assistance to their “non-Aryan” co-religionists. It also obscures the complex entanglements between the religious, racial, and national identities of the refugees themselves.
My research comes at a moment of exciting change in the field. The opening of the Vatican archives for the wartime pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) in 2020 has generated renewed interest in how the Catholic Church—and the Vatican in particular—perceived, interpreted, and responded to the Nazi persecution of the Jews and grappled with the Holocaust. One relevant example is the “Ebrei” Series (Hebrew Series), a digitized archival collection in the Vatican Secretariat of State. It contains thousands of petitions to Pope Pius XII from European Jews persecuted by fascist regimes. At the University of Münster, historian Hubert Wolf and his team have created the “Asking the Pope for Help” Project, which catalogs thousands of Jewish and “non-Aryan” petitions scattered across the Vatican archives, not just those in the “Ebrei” Series.
Drawing from extensive archival research, oral history interviews, and private papers, my dissertation complements existing scholarship that examines Vatican responses to “non-Aryan” Catholics and Jews during the Second World War. It contextualizes the U.S. Church within broader transnational and transatlantic responses to “non-Aryan” refugees procuced by racial antisemitism between 1933 and 1943. A thematic approach reveals “Catholics on the move”—both helpers and refugees. My work thus moves away from the Vatican and the so- called “Pius Wars” that scrutinize Pope Pius XII’s attitudes toward European Jews and his alleged public silence during the Holocaust. Institutional studies have not spared the U.S. Church. In the 1970s and 80s, historian Haim Genizi concluded that the U.S. Catholic Church was apathetic to the plight of Christian refugees. Since then, a small body of U.S. scholarship has nuanced Genizi’s claims, portraying the U.S. Church as an “overlooked network of assistance.” Besides analyzing networks of refugee aid, my dissertation incorporates (as much as possible) refugee cases and biographies achieved through genealogical reconstructions and rare oral histories from surviving refugees or their family members.
Recently, historians David Kertzer and Hubert Wolf have reexamined the Vatican’s relatively well-documented concern for “non-Aryan” Catholics amid ongoing scholarly debates about the Holy See’s concern for Jewish victims. In 1939, the Vatican intervened with the Brazilian government to issue 3,000 visas for “non-Aryans.” Fewer than 1,000 were ever issued. My dissertation documents a fascinating interwar and early wartime story. After realizing that U.S. immigration quotas were filled for years, the German episcopate turned its attention to South America in 1939 and pleaded with the Vatican to take an active role apart from the struggling national churches to accommodate emigrants. So, what role did the U.S. Church play in assisting Catholic refugees?
The story begins in 1933, but it did not involve U.S. Catholics until the end of 1936. In 1933, German social workers in the Saint Raphael Society, founded in 1871 to aid Catholic immigrants, already considered the United States and Brazil as prospective resettlement sites for “non-Aryans.” The quiet emigration of Catholics to the Western Hemisphere was the priority of Father Max Grösser, Secretary General of the Saint Raphael Society. Grösser traveled to Canada and the United States to push for assistance for “non-Aryans” and other persecuted Catholics. After the Nazi government passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, German Catholics on the Committee for Catholic Non-Aryans estimated 500,000 “non-Aryan” Catholics. Though the number was certainly inflated, the perception of high refugee numbers—during an era of economic downturn and xenophobia—mattered.
Until the mid-1930s, organized refugee committees for Catholics were virtually non-existent in Europe. Exiled German Catholics languished in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, and elsewhere. A few had arrived in the United States unsure of their next steps or which organization could assist them: Jewish or Catholic. In 1936, Dutch Catholics established the Catholic Committee for Refugees (Katholiek Comité voor Vluchtelingen) in Utrecht, funded in part by the Dutch Episcopate by parishioners. Father Hans Reinhold, a German priest and antifascist dissident, established connections with prominent exiles in European cities. At the Vatican, he even managed to meet Eugenio Pacelli, then Cardinal Secretary of State and future Pope Pius XII. The Vatican was concerned about refugees but would not jeopardize the 1933 Concordat it had negotiated with the Nazi government.
By 1936, through Reinhold and other Catholic actors, pressure was growing for the U.S. Church to act. U.S. bishops—and ostensibly the Vatican—were awaiting responses from German bishops. In August 1936 the German episcopate sent a letter to prominent U.S. bishops asking to aid a small number of “non-Aryan” Catholics. In December 1936, the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC)—established by U.S. bishops in 1919 to protect the social and spiritual welfare of Catholics, including immigrants—agreed to assist German refugees for three years. The Catholic Committee for Refugees from Germany (CCRG) helped mostly “non-Aryans” but also Catholics with no Jewish ancestry. In 1937, the CCRG distinguished between “Non-Aryans” and “Aryans,” which shows how Nazi language had become standard rhetoric in refugee aid circles. After 1937, the racial terms “non-Aryan” and “Aryan” remained, but any statistical differentiation vanished. Amid nativist suspicions of helping Jewish refugeees, the U.S. Church always claimed to be helping deserving Catholics. In July 1939, the CCRG had 3,520 active refugee cases, most of whom were “non-Aryan” based on CCRG fundraising publicity and my own genealogical investigations.
Assistance involved short-term loans and employment searches via letters to universities, hospitals, and other professional employers. National fundraising campaigns occurred in the late 1930s. Fundraising and assistance were herculean tasks, especially after the Anschluss of Austria and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, during which the CCRG struggled with growing refugee cases, a restrictive immigration system, a national economic depression, and meager funds. My research suggests that refugee numbers equaled or exceeded Brazil, the focus of current scholarship, if spouses and children are counted, whose naturalization continued after the war. Thus, while transnational efforts to assist Catholic refugees were hardly “successful,” the United States and Brazil emerged as limited but viable relocation sites, relatively speaking. This enabled a number of refugee families to start anew, whose descendants are among us today. The NCWC was conscious of the many “non-Aryans” arriving at Ellis Island until the outbreak of the Second World War. In the United States, many “non-Aryan” Catholic families became established professionals—some world renowned—whose descendants struggle to understand their family histories.
Naturally, a challenge is documenting both the identities as well as the number of “non-Aryan” refugees. Through genealogy and archival sources, I am trying to ascertain the number of Catholic refugees assisted by the NCWC and CCRG. Scholars are interested in the “Ebrei” Series petitions and Brazil-bound refugee microhistories. My research has contributed biographical insight into the “non-Aryan” refugee crisis. Many Central European Catholic cases helped by the NCWC had undergone Austritte (exit, meaning resignation from the religious community) from Judaism and underwent conversions in the 1800s through the Nazis take-over. This was for a variety of motives: religious conviction, intermarriage, and professonal considerations. Surviving refugees and their children granted me precious documents, correspondence, visas, baptismal certificates, and professional references that illustrate how Catholic networks assisted refugees, many of whom had lived privileged European lives, until the Nuremberg Laws rendered them unemployed. For the CCRG, a “worthy” Catholic case needed to document and moral and Catholic character. A concern for transnational Catholic aid organiztaions was Jews “masquerading” as Catholics. And while U.S. Catholics were amenable to some cooperation with Jewish and Protestant refugee agencies, preserving one’s Catholic soul was paramount to Church thinking. My reading of the archives shows more willingness and less suspicion when working with “non-Aryans,” especially when their Catholic documents were in order. Still, the need for “worthy” refugee cases reflected the economic and social anxieties that pervaded the Church, governments, and societies about immigrants becoming a public burden, taking jobs from Americans, and becoming a racial and religious outsiders in mainstream white Anglo-Saxon Protestant society.
This research note cannot cover all my research findings, on which I am elaborating in a current manuscript for publication. Ultimately, the history of “non-Aryan” Catholic refugees invites scholars to blur the lines between “Church” from “Jewish” history. Nazi racial antisemitism disrupted conventional religious boundaries and compelled Christian institutions across Europe and the Americas to confront pastoral, humanitarian, and political challenges for a refugee population who fell outside Jewish identity and refugee aid organizations. The experiences of these refugees demonstrate that religious identity, racial classification, and national belonging were often deeply entangled in the twentieth century. By recovering the stories of individuals and families assisted by Catholic networks, my hope is that this research contributes to a growing effort to place refugees themselves at the center of siloed narratives of antisemitism, displacement, war, and genocide, while illuminating the political and religious forces that shaped their journeys. As new archival collections continue to emerge and descendants seek to understand their family histories, the study of “non-Aryan” Catholics offers a promising avenue for further research into the complexities of religion, race, migration, and memory in the age of fascism.
