The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  Still today there is no consensus on the number of exiles who passed through Lisbon in the war years. An often cited historical study puts the figure at about 100,000, with nearly half coming in the year following the surrender of France. Other studies give the number of 200,000, while one estimates it as nearly a million, and yet another, supremely cautious, leaves it that “many refugees” moved through during the war. Numbers aside, what is certain is that, as the historian Michael S. Marrus wrote, beginning in the summer of 1940 “Lisbon soon became the refugee capital of Europe, the nerve center of various relief agencies and the principal port of embarkation on the European continent.” The writer Arthur Koestler, who knew the Lisbon route by hard personal experience, said the same in a 1941 book: “Lisbon was the bottleneck of Europe, the last open gate of a concentration camp extending over the greater part of the Continent’s surface.” And, in a grim metaphor, he repeated himself in the same work: “And the procession of despair went on and on, streaming through this last open port, Europe’s gaping mouth, vomiting the contents of her poisoned stomach.”

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  James Reston had gathered material on Lisbon’s refugees while awaiting ship passage to Bermuda and on to the United States. A member of the Times’ London bureau during the worst days of German bombing, he had survived the air war only to come down with a case of undulant fever that caused a return home. The usual way back was a flight from London to Lisbon, then transatlantic passage by ship or plane to New York. Reston’s Lisbon report carried a local dateline, and if in fact it was transmitted by cable or radio from the city it would have passed under the eye of Portuguese censors. In the country’s balancing act of wartime neutrality, they would strip it of anything that might annoy the warring sides or the Salazar government.

  An obvious way of circumventing censorship was to have news written in Lisbon then carried to New York by passengers on Pan American flights, a method followed by Ralph Ingersoll, editor and founder of New York’s PM, when he brought back with him dispatches by the Lisbon correspondent of the London Times, W. E. Lucas. Ingersoll both told of his stay in Lisbon and introduced Lucas’s first story in the December 3, 1940, edition of the newspaper. “Berlin may be the most depressed, London the most inspiring city in Europe,” Ingersoll began his report, set off by a box within Lucas’s. “But Lisbon is the most extraordinary.” He went on to depict the city in colorful detail as a place where

  American generals sleep in attics because they cannot get rooms in hotels. Where the fisherwomen still walk barefoot with their baskets on their heads—past the traffic lights that are so new and wonderful that crowds still stand and watch them change from red to green… . Lisbon, where they go to work at ten and stop at one to talk and sleep. Where at eleven they come out of their offices into the coffee shops to read the newspapers in which there is no news, because, if the papers printed any news, it might offend the Germans or the British.

  Since censorship equally restricted what American readers knew about extraordinary Lisbon, while in the city Ingersoll had looked for someone to improve his newspaper’s coverage, then coming from a Portuguese working for the United Press, and found him in Lucas. He was, said Ingersoll, American trained, had a wife born in Chicago, and knew well the current situation in Portugal from his position with the London Times. “I hope he can get further dispatches across the Atlantic by Clipper,” Ingersoll added. “I cannot guarantee they will reach this country, but as long as they do, PM will print them.”

  Lucas’s initial story concentrated on the sort of shocking refugee accounts heard in Lisbon from those who had fled through France and Spain. His second, carried in PM on December 4, sketched recent Portuguese history, then turned to the present with Europe’s tragedy bringing “a fleeting though real excitement to Lisbon’s streets and a startling prosperity to her people” at the same time it left them “surprised and not a little bewildered as the spotlight of international interest swung on them.” Remaining pieces in the four-dispatch series dealt with Portugal’s lack of military strength, with noting the excessive number of Germans seen on Lisbon streets (“What on earth can they do?”), and with Nazi propaganda inundating the country. On December 13 PM temporarily closed its focus on Lisbon with a two-page photo display of stranded refugees, the pictures taken by Eugene Tillinger, a French journalist and photographer who had been waiting months for a ship to the United States.

  Another obvious way of getting around Portuguese censorship was for newsmen passing through Lisbon, as against those posted there, to wait for return to Britain or America before submitting work for publication. In so doing, less deadline-bound magazine journalists like Harvey Klemmer gained a distinct edge on newspaper colleagues. Among the earliest Lisbon stories in American magazines—it appeared more than a half-year before Klemmer’s report—came from a newspaperman turned broadcaster, Eric Sevareid. Working in Paris with Edward R. Murrow’s fledging CBS radio team when the war began, Sevareid had escaped the German advance with passage from Bordeaux to Britain aboard a small ship overloaded with refugees. In London he reported on the blitz, the work cut short when, like Reston, sickness caused his return to America. Lisbon would be his second escape point from the Continent.

  Sevareid’s “Lisbon—Escape Hatch of Europe” in The Living Age in January 1941 opened with his arrival on a British flying boat coming in over the “scrambled necklace of twinkling lights about Lisbon’s superb harbor” and a feeling of immense relief at “this sight of the lamps of peace after fourteen months in war and darkness.” A steward on the plane injected a dash of complexity into his mood by pointing out two other descending planes—one a Pan American seaplane from New York, the other a converted Nazi bomber, a Junkers 90, carrying passengers from Berlin.

  Once on the ground, Sevareid turned back to his sense of relief by noting about Lisbon a “fragrance of Paris before the war.” The hot working day over, Portuguese men, their wives customarily at home after dark, were emerging from steep narrow streets to sit and talk at cafés that spilled across sidewalks beneath gaudy neon signs. Sevareid’s hotel was the elegant Palácio in Estoril, but here another complication arose when a nightcap in the bar brought the realization that “luck had tossed me into the espionage center of World War II.” Lisbon might feel like Paris before the present war, but Estoril seemed to have more the atmosphere of Zurich before World War I. Hushed conversations went on throughout the hotel, where rooms were occupied by deposed statesmen of occupied countries, and a suite was said to be reserved for the former king of Romania, Carol II, currently in Spain and unable to reach Portugal. Portugal itself, Sevaried suspected, might soon come under the German heel.

  This seemed a strong possibility when in the hotel lobby he spotted Biefurn, identified as the “sinister assistant” to the Gestapo’s Heinrich Himmler, talking with Friedrich Sieburg, a former Paris correspondent for a German newspaper and now a high-ranking propagandist credited with perfecting fifth column tactics in countries on the Nazi invasion list. The implication of the meeting was that Portugal might now figure in the German agenda, the likelihood strengthened by Sieburg recently insinuating himself into Portuguese intellectual life with a flattering book about the country’s colonial past and bright future.

  If Sieburg’s methods were sly, a German pilot’s were literally out in the open—or so Sevareid learned one morning when a Junkers passenger plane on its way to Berlin passed alarmingly low over the Palácio. “We think it’s to get us used to the swastika,” a waiter observed when Sevareid asked why the pilot flew so off course. “The first time he did it, the visa line at your consulate grew much longer.”

  Mention of the visa throng drew Sevareid’s attention to the exiles waiting in Lisbon to get to America, a number he placed at about twenty thousand. They were nervous, depressed, listless since Portugal had no new frontier to sneak or bribe their way across but an ocean that could be spanned only with a stamped visa. The young and harassed American vice consuls were gods for the
refugees, their days given over to lining up at the consulate to learn if there was any change in their status. Some, knowing of the American draft, offered themselves as military volunteers—“a humorless joke to the harassed consuls.” Still others carried money they had brought with them or won gambling at the Estoril casino in hope of spotting an American consul and initiating a conversation. “They have bribed their way across many borders,” Sevareid wrote, “and cannot believe that money doesn’t talk with American officials, too.”

  Finally, Sevareid concentrated on a specific refugee met by chance in the casino. A young German teacher and writer is recognized because, incredibly, he is wearing ill-fitting trousers Sevareid had given him while visiting a French concentration camp during his days as a newspaper reporter for the Paris Herald. Like other exiles, the young man is waiting in Lisbon for an overseas visa. Together the two leave the smoky casino for the Estoril beach, and here Sevareid mentions the presence of Friedrich Sieburg in the hotel. The young man’s eyes flashed and he said, “Sieburg here? I think that means the kiss of death. Tomorrow I will make some acquaintances among the Portuguese fishermen who have boats in the harbor.” (In his autobiography, Sevareid identified the young German as Ernst Adam and, after his remark about leaving on a fishing boat, had him reverse course and say, “No, I won’t. Some time or other you have to stop this running and turn around. It may as well be here. There is no longer any room to be a neutral or a refugee.”)

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  T. J. Hamilton’s “Turbulent Gateway of a Europe on Fire” appeared in the New York Times’ Sunday magazine two months after Eric Sevareid’s article and echoed his sense of the wartime relief provided by Lisbon. “For a man without a country,” Hamilton reported, “there could be no lovelier place to be in exile” than Lisbon. But in contrast to most published reports of the time, he largely concentrated on refugees who were sufficiently well off to take advantage of the city’s pleasures. (A story in the newspaper just over a week before Hamilton’s article noted that although “moneyed refugees” tossed about their funds at roulette and baccarat in the casino, the bulk of Portugal’s refugees were “mostly incapable of self-support”; those “who are destitute get $1.20 weekly” as a handout from the government.) “Money is no object to these refugees,” Hamilton pointed out.

  Many, particularly Belgians and Dutch, brought away fortunes in uncut diamonds, which they draw from manila envelopes in proof of their claims that they would not become public charges if admitted to the United States. Others, profiting from their own ingenuity and the general confusion as the Germans swept through France, managed to smuggle bar gold across frontiers where discovery would have meant immediate confiscation or perhaps arrest.

  Yet while valuable possessions opened the way to luxury hotels, rented villas, and fine restaurants, getting beyond the city to permanent resettlement, and getting there quickly, could prove stubbornly difficult if not impossible. The United States and other countries had cut back on the number of refugees they would accept; and even with a precious overseas visa in hand, the westbound Clippers of Pan American Airlines averaged about thirty passengers on each flight while the small ships of the American Export Lines carried fewer than two hundred. Many of the limited places on ships and planes went to diplomats and others on official wartime business rather than to political and racial refugees.

  Hamilton put the total number of refugees then caught in Lisbon at about five thousand. This was what was left of some ten thousand who had fled to Portugal in the first year of the war, a figure that included many returning Americans. Given the stubborn realities of getting overseas visas and then overseas transport, Hamilton believed the lingering five thousand were probably stuck in Portugal for the duration of the war. Still, any refugee who reached Portugal had to “rank among the darlings of the gods” since they were in a neutral country and could divert themselves with the delights of Lisbon, the Estoril casino, and the cocktail bars of the Sun Coast (“where else in Europe can you get a Martini made with English gin?”). Hamilton told of a French family who had fled to Portugal after learning they were on a Gestapo list to be sent to a concentration camp. In Estoril they occupied a bathing cabin next to some Nazi visitors, “and to see the two families sitting within a few feet of each other in the bright sunshine was an incredible demonstration of the difference neutral territory makes, although they found nothing to say to each other.” Hamilton added:

  For these refugees, what was once a sizeable continent has now shrunk to this narrow strip of land along the coast. Here at the southwestern extremity of Europe they are safe for the moment from Hitler’s divisions. But there is no way of knowing the Axis will not turn on defenseless Portugal, and the refugees think of nothing but further flight across the sea.

  Yet for the time being there were no troops marching on Portuguese streets, there was no censorship of personal letters, and while the local press was tightly controlled, newspapers from New York, London, and Berlin were readily available. “All in all,” Hamilton concluded, Lisbon is the “last refuge of sanity in Europe, where for the moment there are no problems.”

  For the Portuguese government, on the other hand, there was ongoing worry about fifth columnists together with an influx of Germans in the country with no apparent reason for being there. Hamilton relayed a story passed around among refugees of a lengthy discussion in a Lisbon bar one night about whether a German fifth column existed in the country. Finally, “one of the sturdy men at the next table arose and, with a stiff bow, said in English, ‘You need not worry about the fifth column, we are already here.’” The government had bolstered the size of the secret police (known in the World War II period as the PVDE, the initials in Portuguese of the Police of Vigilance and State Defense) to keep an eye on the refugees, had moved about half of the five thousand into towns outside Lisbon, and required a police pass for anyone visiting Lisbon even for a day. The decision to scatter the refugees was, however, only partly a security matter. Grumbling provincial hotel owners who felt they were missing out on the lucrative refugee business had made it known they wanted their slice of the financial pie.

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  A month before Hamilton’s account of Lisbon’s prosperous refugees, Fortune magazine had mused on the same subject, though as glimpsed from the ultimate end of the escape route in America, in an article with the forthright title “Rich Refugees.” Such exiles—or as they preferred to think of themselves, émigrés—bore no resemblance to the humble immigrants who had previously sailed past the Statue of Liberty. While still far fewer in number, the rich arrivals came not with a dream of making fortunes in America but with fortunes to preserve or enhance in the form of hefty bank accounts, jewels worth millions, and art collections they had stowed away aboard ships.

  As a group they could be separated, said Fortune, into three categories: international society types, which included rich American repatriates; royalty; and business tycoons who saw in the United States further entrepreneurial possibilities. The magazine would not hazard a guess as to how the affluent refugees might affect the country, but if nothing else they provided amusing grist for gossip columns. For example, it was said of the Duke of Westminster that he had sent a thousand of his orchid plants to Florida for wartime safety. Similarly, within the year some eighty Rolls-Royces had arrived as refugees and could now be seen tooling along the smarter streets of New York and Long Island.

  “Rich Refugees” was mostly whimsical, but “War by Refugee” in the Saturday Evening Post the following month was stridently serious. The argument set out by Samuel Lubell—a Washington newspaperman and veteran magazine writer who in the 1950s and 1960s would become widely known as a public opinion analyst—was that the marshaling of refugees from Germany and the occupied countries was yet another tool in the Nazi arsenal of total war. For one thing, the Nazis were disguising Gestapo agents as refugees and taking advantage of relief agencies to scatter them throughout the world as spies, propagandists, and fifth columnists. Equa
lly important, the forced migration of Jews and others was a way of relieving German food shortages while at the same time weakening the United States and other democracies by shifting to them the burden of feeding the newcomers.

  The refugee stream, the Nazis also understood, had moneymaking potential. According to Lubell, Germany, operating through the government of Vichy France, proposed to the United States a scheme of shipping, for a per-person charge of $485 paid in New York, Jews of nonmilitary age from Germany or occupied territories to Lisbon, from where they could be sent on to America. Two to five trains a week would leave Aachen for Lisbon, with each train carrying five hundred people, the cars sealed to prevent escapes. The United States Lines would be asked to handle the Lisbon-New York shipping route, with the Nazis guaranteeing 750 passengers every two weeks. “How much money actually was expected to be raised in this human export drive,” Lubell wrote, “is a Gestapo secret. The Nazis did let it be known that they were prepared to release as many as 450,000 persons if visas were available, which would have netted them more than $100,000,000, not including the property of the refugees.”

  The Gestapo pushed ahead with the zany proposal and, Lubell continued, “started the first of its sealed trains rolling into Lisbon without waiting for the completion of arrangements” with the Americans. What happened upon the train’s arrival, including how Portugal dealt with its large volume of unexpected guests, was not revealed, though Lubell injected the large qualification that “even if the scheme was blocked, as it almost certainly would be, some trainloads would get through.” It only mattered for his dark disclosures that the forcible movement of Jews and others to Lisbon, now or in the future, was evidence of Germany putting into action a strategy in the refugee war “to get rid of those they do not want to feed, squeeze as much as possible from them in the process, and dump them where they will do the most harm.” As for the lack of documentation in his clearly specious report, Lubell noted that he had spoken with figures at the State Department and in foreign embassies and had studied more than a thousand reports and letters from abroad. He could not directly quote from anyone or anything, but he assured readers that his every statement had been thoroughly checked against official sources.