Spain and Portugal

Spain and Portugal both played a particular role in the Holocaust. Both were neutral throughout the Second World War. Both had fascist or fascist-adjacent dictatorships. Both became significant transit countries for Jewish refugees fleeing occupied Europe. Both have been the subject of historical reassessment, with the wartime myth of generous Iberian rescue replaced by a more complicated picture of inconsistent policies, individual diplomatic heroism, and a generally restrictive official line that was repeatedly defied by named officials acting on their own initiative. Together, the two countries were responsible for saving the lives of perhaps 50,000 to 80,000 Jewish refugees who reached the Iberian peninsula and were eventually able to leave for the Americas or Britain.

Spain

Spain in 1939 was emerging from a civil war won by the right-wing Nationalist coalition under General Francisco Franco. The new regime was authoritarian, Catholic, and ideologically aligned with the Axis powers, but Franco himself was determined to keep Spain out of the world war. He had inherited a country devastated by the civil war, and he understood that another war would destroy the regime he had just established. Through 1940 and 1941, Hitler attempted repeatedly to bring Spain into the war on the Axis side. Franco refused, citing Spanish economic weakness, food shortages, and the need for German military support that Hitler was unwilling to provide on Franco’s terms.

Spanish neutrality created a route for Jewish refugees fleeing France and the Netherlands. From 1940 onwards, Jewish refugees crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, often illegally, often with the help of mountain guides paid through Jewish relief organisations. Spanish border policy was inconsistent. At various points the Spanish authorities turned refugees back at the border, sending them to certain death in occupied France. At other points the authorities admitted them, held them for periods in poor conditions in Spanish detention camps such as Miranda de Ebro, and eventually allowed them to transit to Lisbon for onward emigration. The variation depended on the particular border guards, the orders being issued from Madrid in any given week, and the volume of refugees attempting the crossing.

Spanish citizenship and the Sephardic Jews

One particular Spanish initiative was the policy of granting Spanish protective papers to Sephardic Jews on the basis of their descent from the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. The Spanish government had passed a law in 1924 that allowed any Sephardic Jew anywhere in the world to apply for Spanish citizenship. The policy was rarely used in practice. During the war, Spanish diplomats in occupied countries used the 1924 law as the basis for issuing protective papers to Sephardic Jews under threat of deportation. Angel Sanz Briz, the Spanish charge d’affaires in Budapest in 1944, issued protective papers to several thousand Hungarian Jews on this basis, even when many of the recipients were not actually Sephardic. Sanz Briz was later joined in this work by the Italian businessman Giorgio Perlasca, who, after Sanz Briz left Budapest, posed as the Spanish charge d’affaires himself and continued the operation.

The Spanish operation in Budapest was one of the major rescue operations of the Holocaust. Sanz Briz and Perlasca together saved around 5,000 Hungarian Jews from deportation in late 1944.

Portugal

Portugal under Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was an authoritarian conservative regime, but, like Franco’s Spain, kept out of the war. Portugal had a long-standing alliance with Britain and was strategically positioned for the trans-Atlantic refugee route. Lisbon became, between 1940 and 1942, the principal European departure point for Jewish refugees seeking to reach the United States, Britain or Latin America. Around 100,000 refugees passed through Lisbon during this period. The transatlantic shipping operation that carried them was largely organised by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the American Jewish relief organisations.

Sousa Mendes

The Portuguese consul in Bordeaux in June 1940 was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a career diplomat with a strong religious conviction. As the German army advanced into France, refugees flooded the French Atlantic coast looking for ways to leave Europe. Salazar’s government had issued specific instructions that Portuguese visas should not be granted to refugees, particularly Jewish ones. Sousa Mendes, faced with the queue of refugees outside his consulate, decided to ignore his instructions. Over three days he and his sons issued visas to around 30,000 refugees, including thousands of Jews, working continuously without sleep until the Germans arrived in Bordeaux.

The Portuguese government recalled him in disgrace, dismissed him from the diplomatic service, and stripped him of his pension. He died in poverty in 1954. His name was rehabilitated in Portugal only in the 1980s, decades after his death. Yad Vashem recognised him as Righteous Among the Nations in 1966.

The Portuguese refugee policy

Portuguese policy as a whole was less generous than Sousa Mendes’s individual conduct suggests. The Portuguese state was willing for refugees to transit through Portugal but not to settle there. Refugees were held in transit conditions in Lisbon and the surrounding coastal towns until they could be put on ships to the Americas. The Portuguese state did not actively persecute Jewish refugees but did not actively help them either. The Joint and HIAS funded the operation. The Portuguese authorities permitted it to happen.

The post-war record

Both Spain and Portugal initially took the post-war position that they had been generous protectors of Jewish refugees. The reassessment, beginning in the 1990s and continuing today, has produced a more nuanced picture. Both countries have formally honoured Sousa Mendes (Portugal) and Sanz Briz (Spain) and have acknowledged the role of named individual diplomats. Both have been more reluctant to acknowledge the inconsistency and reluctance of the wider state policies. Spain in 2014 passed a law granting Spanish citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews, expanding the 1924 law that had been used during the war; the policy is sometimes presented as Spain’s belated reckoning with its expulsion of 1492 and its more equivocal wartime record.

The Iberian peninsula was not a haven for the Jews of Europe in the way that Sweden was. It was, however, the principal route by which Jewish refugees who had reached the Atlantic coast of Europe could leave for the Americas. The 100,000 or so refugees who transited through Lisbon, and the several thousand more who reached safety through Spanish-issued protective papers in occupied Europe, are the contribution the two Iberian dictatorships made to the rescue effort. They did less than they could have done. They did more than nothing.

See also

Sources

  • Haim Avni, Spain, the Jews, and Franco, Jewish Publication Society, 1982
  • Patrick von zur Muhlen, Fluchtweg Spanien-Portugal, Klartext, 1992
  • Bernd Rother, Spanien und der Holocaust, Niemeyer, 2001
  • Olivia Mattis and Harry Ezratty (eds), Sousa Mendes: Portugal’s Schindler, Sousa Mendes Foundation, multiple editions
  • USHMM: Spain and Portugal