The Lisbon Route Read online

  Entry and Escape in Nazi Europe

  Ronald Weber

  IVAN R. DEE

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Ivan R. Dee

  A member of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  http://www.ivanrdee.com

  Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 2011 by Ronald Weber

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weber, Ronald, 1934–

  The Lisbon route : entry and escape in Nazi Europe / Ronald Weber.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-56663-876-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-56663-892-0 (electronic)

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Portugal—Lisbon. 2. Exiles—Portugal—Lisbon—History—20th century. 3. Immigrants—Portugal—Lisbon—History—20th century. 4. Escapes—Portugal—Lisbon—History—20th century. 5. Neutrality—Portugal—Lisbon—History—20th century. 6. Lisbon (Portugal)—History—20th century. 7. Lisbon (Portugal)—Social life and customs—20th century. 8. Lisbon (Portugal)—Biography. 9. World War, 1939–1945—Biography. 10. World War, 1939–1945—Social aspects—Portugal—Lisbon. I. Title.

  D763.P82L593 2011

  940.53086’9140946942—dc22

  2010047524

  ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Pat, Liz, Andrea, and Kathy

  Preface

  The script of Casablanca opens with a capsule account of Lisbon as the escape hatch from Nazi Europe:

  A long shot of a revolving globe. As it revolves, lines of fleeing refugees are superimposed over it. Over this scene comes the voice of a narrator.

  narrator: With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas. Lisbon became the great embarkation point. But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly; and so, a tortuous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up.

  After a map displays the circuitous Lisbon route of the film, the narrator checks off the main stops along the way: Paris to Marseille, across the Mediterranean to Oran, around the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco, and finally—after “wait in Casablanca, and wait, and wait and wait”—to Lisbon.

  The Lisbon Route tells the story of refugees like Casablanca’s Ilsa and Victor Laszlo who fled to Lisbon in wartime, transforming the tranquil port city on the edge of the Continent into occupied Europe’s last open door to freedom. The great bulk of refugees made a land journey to Portugal, and consequently it was in Lisbon rather than Casablanca where they often waited out their long delays. At the same time Lisbon offered escape from Europe, it allowed entry to it, and the following pages also trace the flow of figures who had reason to journey toward the war zone. Whether coming or going, I view those who took the Lisbon route against a background of the illuminated city they reached after the lights of Europe had largely gone out—a city, unlike the City of Light between the wars, that was a funnel to pass through more than a final destination. Those who reached Lisbon in World War II were a tribe of transients, and typically their experience of the city was narrowly bounded by immediate needs of food, shelter, and further transportation.

  There was a sense in which the Lisbon of the Portuguese scarcely existed for the transients, and vice versa. An American magazine article in 1941, describing the refugee migration through Lisbon during its high period, held that “all the Portuguese people together with their dictator, virtually vanished from sight. The outside world couldn’t see the Portuguese because they were temporarily eclipsed by the swarms of fugitives who descended upon Portugal after the collapse of France.” Hugh Muir, a British journalist working in Lisbon during the war, wrote that the wave of refugees, diplomats, spies, and assorted others that washed over the city “left the Portuguese much as they were.” Aside from workers in hotels and restaurants who could not avoid it, the “imported activity seemed to be unnoticed by most of the resident population.”

  Such comments put the divide between the transients and the Portuguese too starkly, yet they suggest the existence of an essentially separate city: the Lisbon of the displaced or those otherwise set in motion by the war. Of course, the city of the Portuguese could not be entirely ignored by the transients, and it is not in these pages. Portugal and the Portuguese provided the setting, the services, and most critically the shield of neutrality that allowed Lisbon to function as a gateway to and from the war. In later chapters I look at matters—diplomatic links with Britain; propaganda and spy warfare; the fate of Portugal’s Atlantic islands; trade involvement with both the Allies and Axis—that challenged neutrality and so were of vital importance to the Portuguese and the transients alike. But my primary focus is on the experience of those who paused for long or short periods in the wartime city—as distilled in memoirs, diaries, letters, government reports, press accounts, articles, fiction, film, and theater—rather than on that of those, the willing or unwilling hosts, for whom it was home.

  A geographical note: “Lisbon” as used here encompasses the beach communities of the Sun Coast, Sintra, and other nearby locales in Portugal, as it usually did for Lisbon’s temporary residents. I also give attention to events and people in locations outside Portugal, mainly the cities of Bordeaux, Marseille, and Madrid, which were important way stations for many who took the Lisbon route.

  Europe Following the Franco-German Armistice of June 1940

  Lisbon, the Tagus River and Estuary, and Nearby Locales

  1

  Hub of the Western Universe

  Lisbon at present is the hub of the western universe, and it must be the most fascinating place in the world.

  —Irish Times, October 23, 1941

  Today Lisbon stands once more at the threshold of great events.”

  So began a lengthy article in the National Geographic magazine in August 1941. In the illustrious past, adventurers had sailed from the Portuguese port city on the southwestern sliver of the Old World to claim new lands and a world empire; now, in a new and radically reversed period of prominence, Lisbon was on the receiving end of a great flood of refugees escaping an Old World at war. Geography and Portugal’s wartime neutrality had thrust the country’s capital to international attention as Europe’s last open gateway of escape for victims of Nazi terror.

  But there was irony here.

  Refugees reached Lisbon after long and sometimes perilous journeys, only to leave again as swiftly as possible. They were the new adventurers, though of need rather than choice. Lisbon was still Europe; for nearly all exiles the city was merely a transfer point to permanent resettlement in Great Britain, North and South America, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean—to anywhere that was not Europe.

  Since they streamed in faster than they could be sent out by ship or air transport, on freighters carrying Portuguese goods to Britain or America, or on fishing boats willing for a price to take them through the Straits of Gibraltar to North Africa, the refugees formed in Lisbon a swelling bottleneck of fretful humanity. The city f
reed them from war yet also stopped them in their tracks, with no more borders to cross, with only the open sea ahead and limited means of getting across. For weeks and months they waited, milling about in a no-man’s-land between past and future. The Lisbon route was the way of freedom, but the holdup before the final journey to safety could seem a cruel twist of fate.

  And there was further irony.

  Lisbon in World War II was a way into Europe as well as a way out—a revolving door of no importance to refugees wanting only to get away but of high value to the warring powers. As an open city, Lisbon allowed figures from both sides—correspondents, diplomats, businessmen, military brass, secret agents, smugglers, exchanged internees, ordinary citizens—to come and go, as it did newspapers, magazines, films, mail, and cables.

  And members of both sides could simply linger in the city, savoring sun-splashed days and brightly illuminated nights, ample food and drink, well-stocked stores, and the possibility of winning or losing a fortune at the gambling casino in nearby Estoril while rubbing shoulders with the enemy in a café or, equally unsettling, following his foursome on manicured golf links. New arrivals at the airport in Sintra, some fifteen miles from Lisbon, were invariably startled by its multinational character in the midst of war. Five airlines provided passenger service from Lisbon to Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, and North Africa while sharing office space in the terminal and parking their planes side by side on the tarmac.

  But given the course of the European war, with Germany in control of France and capable of pressuring Francisco Franco’s fascist regime in Spain, Portugal’s vast neighbor on the Iberian peninsula, could a country so small and weak maintain its neutrality? Would the Allies demand military access to the Continent through Lisbon or take over Portugal’s strategically placed Atlantic islands of Cape Verde or the Azores, in either case forcing Germany to add the country to its list of victims? As the war raged on could Lisbon possibly hold out as occupied Europe’s lone port of arrival and departure?

  The National Geographic article raised doubts. “Before these lines appear in print,” came a disclaimer at the start, “Portugal may be only a memory and Lisbon a ghost town of the Second World War.” And in closing the article returned to the possibility of the virtually defenseless country of some six million soon coming under Nazi rule: “It is almost too much to hope that, after ravaging nine-tenths of the Continent, the dogs of war should stop at the Portuguese border.”

  *

  The author of “Lisbon—Gateway to a Warring Europe,” Harvey Klemmer, had reached the city by way of London, where the ex-newspaperman had served since 1938 as a publicist and speechwriter for American Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. His book about life in embattled Britain, They’ll Never Quit, had just been published in the United States, the gritty resistance of the title leading to a plea for unlimited American economic and military support. Shortly before printing his Lisbon report, the National Geographic had carried “Everyday Life in Wartime England,” an article drawn from the book.

  In photos accompanying Klemmer’s “Lisbon,” only two depicted transients—passengers arriving on a Pan American Airways Clipper from New York; ticket-seekers jamming the airline’s Lisbon’s office—with the rest, many credited to Klemmer, merely local tourist snapshots. One of the unexpected pleasures of wartime Lisbon, Klemmer pointed out, was the freedom to take photographs when and where one wished. “I do not suppose,” he wrote, “there is another city in Europe today where one may take pictures of such things as shipyards, factories, quays, and oil tanks. You can take anything you like in Portugal.” (One photo accompanying the article, not taken by Klemmer, showed young boys parading down the broad Avenida da Liberdade, Lisbon’s leafy version of the Champs-Elysées. The caption identified the boys as members of the “Youth Movement,” a group created by the government to “promote physical fitness, form character, and inculcate respect for law and discipline.” Left unremarked was that Portuguese Youth, formed in 1936, was a fascist-style organization modeled on Hitler Youth. The uniform of green shirt and khaki trousers included a leather belt, its large metal clasp branded with an S, which some believed stood for the Portuguese dictator António Salazar, and authorities said referred to Service.)

  In Lisbon you could also read what you liked. International publications overflowed newsstands, Klemmer reported, with the displays seemingly devoid of emphasis or segregation, the vendors playing no favorites. “You could get,” he noted, “the London Daily Mail and the New York Times; you can also get the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, the Lavora Fascista, and the Falangist Arriba.” The same was true of Paris newspapers published under German occupation. French refugees were startled when they saw such familiar papers as Paris-Soir or Le Matin, and startled again when they encountered the crude Nazi propaganda inside. (In Marseille an American aid worker was advised to buy Paris-Soir on grounds that “everything is in it, if you know how to read it properly. Read just the opposite of what is written, and you’ll have the whole truth.”)

  Klemmer told of refugees jamming all Lisbon-area boardinghouses and hotel rooms while waiting for ships and planes to carry them away. With the United States the destination of choice, its consulate was inundated with applicants for visas. “If we could go out on the front steps and announce that everyone who wanted to could go to America,” said a consular official, “I think we would get about 40,000.” Klemmer learned that already seven thousand Americans had been evacuated from Lisbon, and those remaining were going home at a rate of about a hundred a week.

  However gradual their rate of departure, American citizens ranked among the privileged few, with priority on American-owned overseas transport—though companies were required to honor previously purchased tickets of noncitizens on dates they came due. Other refugees roamed about the city, grasping at snatches of conversation, easy prey for rumor and deception:

  There’s a Basque fisherman who, for 20,000 escudos, will run passengers to North Africa.

  Have you heard about the Greek passenger ship, going to New York?

  My brother knows a man at the American Express; he says the Portuguese are going to put on another boat.

  My hotel porter says a Spanish freighter is in port, loading for South America.

  If they could somehow block out the plight of the refugees, new arrivals coming from suffering London, Klemmer among them, discovered in lush and colorful Lisbon “some half-forgotten splendor out of another life.” They gaped at the lights, the strolling throngs, the automobile traffic, the displays in the windows. And in seaside Estoril they found a casino operating full blast, conversations conducted without censorship, beaches without mines or barbed wire. Still, never far from mind was Portugal’s vulnerability.

  The country had little military capability, giving rise to a standing joke among Germans and others in the country that Hitler could take Portugal with a telephone call—meaning that a powerful fifth column, already positioned in the country, would rise up; or that the government had a fascist leaning despite its neutrality; or simply that Germany’s military might was so obviously superior that Portugal would not attempt resistance. The best to be said, Klemmer concluded, was that “the Portuguese have handled themselves well, thus far, in one of the most difficult situations with which any nation has even been confronted.”

  *

  Klemmer’s “Lisbon” bore the importance of appearing in a prominent magazine. But, in the summer of 1941, the article added mostly detail and texture to already familiar accounts in American, British, and other national publications about the surprising wartime importance of the small, poor, peripheral, but proud nation that was outside the war and hoping to remain so, yet found itself—as imagined by a columnist in the Irish Times, looking on from a similarly neutral nation—“the most fascinating place in the world.” In December 1940, some nine months before Klemmer’s report, the London Times cited war developments that “have brought Portugal into the glare of the international limelight.” In the s
ame month the New York Times reported that Portugal, “the last comparatively free country on the Continent of Europe,” had war refugees flocking to its port city. Earlier, in October 1940, the London Times noted in an editorial that for more than three months refugees had been coming to Lisbon “by sea and land, by boat and bicycle, by train and on foot, from every country invaded or threatened by the Nazi scourge.”

  Earlier still, in July 1940, the New York Times’ Lisbon correspondent, Alva E. Gaymon, wrote of an expanding refugee population in Lisbon that was increasing by the hundreds each day. The city was a “veritable bee hive” of activity. “From early morning until late at night taxis are running about in all directions. Cafés are open virtually all night and interpreters are at a premium.” As a result of the refugee buildup, accommodations were nearly impossible to find in Lisbon or the nearby beach communities of Estoril, Monte Estoril, and Cascais. The consulates of the overseas countries that the refugees hoped to reach were swamped with work. In the same month of 1940 Lilian Mowrer related in The New Yorker a personal story of joining the flight through France to Lisbon, “the new and magic goal of the growing thousands of refugees.” The refugees were a jumble of nationalities and backgrounds—she was the British-born wife of Edgar Ansel Mowrer, a notable American correspondent based in Paris—but shared a single goal: “All of them were headed for Lisbon, the port of good hope, from which they could escape from the Germans by Clipper, or ocean liner, or freighter, or tramp ship—anything that would take them away from a Europe that was rapidly becoming a prison.”

  The German blitzkrieg that had swept through the Low Countries and France in May 1940 had triggered a mass exodus of refugees fleeing south while under aerial assault by the Luftwaffe. Most of those overflowing the roads and rail stations were French, but there were also Belgians, Dutch, Luxembourgers, Central Europeans, and German refugees who had earlier fled to France and elsewhere—in all, some six to eight million people, with four million fleeing from the Paris region alone. Following the total collapse of France and the signing of the Franco-German armistice on June 22, the country was redrawn into zones—the most important splitting the nation into an occupied zone, which included Paris and the entire Atlantic coast, and a free zone with Vichy as seat of a puppet government and the aged Marshal Philippe Pétain as head of state—and many of the French, refugees in their own land, returned to their homes. For a million or more others, including tens of thousands of Jews and sizable numbers of American and British citizens who had been living or traveling in Europe, the great migration pressed on.