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. Continue reading →