Portugal plays each side against the other in World War II

If you wanted out of Europe during World War II, all signs pointed to Portugal. The same was true if you were a spy and wanted in.

Neutral and seemingly weak, the little country on the Iberian Peninsula managed to play the world powers off each other and avoid invasion. Meanwhile, desperate refugees crowded the streets of Lisbon while a dictator fought to survive and boost his country's wealth.

Neill Lochery, a historian best known for work analyzing the Middle East, chronicles the struggles and success of Portugal in his new book Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945.

In an interview this week, Lochery explored a dictator's dilemmas, a diplomat's bravery, and a legacy that could include tons of Nazi gold.

Q: Lisbon sounds like a combination of both Casablanca (the movie version, at least) and Switzerland. Is that a valid comparison?

A: To me, Lisbon was the real Casablanca, the only city where the allies and axis powers openly operated in Europe. It had all the diamond traders, the refugees, people with letters of transit, people trying to get letters of transit to get to America.
 
The British operations manager said it really resembled Casablanca twenty-fold. That was the atmosphere of Lisbon. But your point about Switzerland is well taken. One of the key questions was neutrality, and the success of maintaining neutrality was a great challenge for the Portuguese.
 
Q: What made Lisbon useful to people trying to get out of Europe?

A: Once France fell in summer of 1940, and specifically Paris fell, refugees started streaming to the south of France. As Germany consolidated its control, they moved into Spain and Portugal to try to get out of Europe to get to America or somewhere else in the free world.
 
Many of these refugees were Jewish, and they were desperate to escape the horrors of the Nazis. As Arthur Koestler said [in a 1941 book], "Lisbon was the bottleneck of Europe." It was the last chance to get out. 

[Koestler, a journalist, added that Lisbon was "the last open gate of a concentration camp extending over the greater part of the Continent's surface."]

Q: How easy was it to get out of Lisbon to a place like America?
 
A: It was very difficult. The leader of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar, saw the refugees as a hugely complicating factor. He's trying to maintain Portugal’s neutrality, and feared a German invasion of Portugal. The Portuguese also feared a proxy invasion by Spain, particularly during 1940 and 1941.
 
He had to juggle a lot of balls in the air. There was a hugely important complicating factor in the question of tungsten, a rare ore that’s mined in the northeast of Portugal and is absolutely vital to arms industries. Without tungsten, it's impossible to produce weapons. So you can see where this is going.
 
This was the key issue between the allies, the Germans and the Portuguese in the war: Would Portugal supply the Germans with tungsten? Salazar refused to stop selling to Germany.

Q: You write about Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, France, who turned out to be a Schindler-like character who saved lives at risk to himself. What's his story?
 
A: Against the wishes of Salazar, he granted visas in May and June 1940 to a number of people specifically of Jewish origin to travel though Portugal. This in effect helped create the refugee crisis in Portugal, but also got a lot of Jews out of France.
 
We hear numbers talking about 30,000 people, but I think we're talking about a couple thousand.

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