by Ronald Weber
In Lisbon’s crowded railway station Red Cross workers quickly moved the wounded prisoners to a room with a large table arranged with flowers, oranges, and sandwiches, then transported them to a hospital. “Nice clean bed,” Janson said of the ward, “new linens. Flowers. Treated us fine.” After a good sleep in a comfortable bed, he “took a very thankful shower. Also 3 barbers spruced us up. Received Pajamas—Robe. Sunday went to Mass in a very pretty Church. Felt swell.” The ward had American magazines, and a movie was shown—Leslie Howard in Pimpernel Smith. Another evening the movie was Bob Hope in Road to Morocco.
Janson and other prisoners were also invited to meals at the Lisbon homes of American diplomats. After one, taxis called for them shortly before midnight—still early by Portuguese custom—and they were taken on a sightseeing tour. “The center of the town is very modernistic,” Janson noted. “Great sight to see theater crowd. The sight of all this gave us quite a tingling sensation.” On another evening the movies were replaced by “swell entertainment” provided by a “fine smiling bunch of kids” from northern Portugal.
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At the same time Lisbon provided a gateway home for exchanged figures, it gave the belligerents a connecting point for exchanging information. But while the transfer of people was conducted openly—the progress of exchange ships sailing between Lisbon and New York drew wide press attention, and when they docked prominent returnees were interviewed and photographed—Allied-Axis communication took place in the shadow world of wartime. This was all the more so when contact involved conditions for possibly ending the war.
In August 1943, Italy—with Mussolini now deposed and Marshal Pietro Badoglio the new head of government—reached out to the Allies for surrender terms while yet officially linked with Germany. After an initial contact in Lisbon between the British ambassador and the new counselor of the Italian legation, Allied authorities instructed General Eisenhower to send two officers from his headquarters in Algiers to Lisbon for a clandestine meeting with an Italian emissary.
General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s American chief of staff, and Brigadier Kenneth W. D. Strong, the British head of his intelligence staff, flew from Tangiers to Gibraltar, after which—with forged papers, dressed in plain clothes, and traveling in a civilian plane—they went on to Lisbon, where George Kennan, now attached to the American legation, drove them about in an aged Buick. The ultra-secret “atmosphere of amateur theatricals”—in the phrase of Harold Macmillan (at the time, the future British prime minister was his country’s political representative at Allied headquarters)—that characterized the powwow of the enemies, was adopted to avoid detection by Lisbon’s international press corps and the German secret service. From Italy came General Giuseppe Castellano, also disguised as a civilian, carrying a false passport, and ostensibly a member of an Italian delegation accompanying a group of Chilean diplomats being exchanged in Lisbon for Italian officials who had left Chile when the country ended relations with Italy. At a stopover in Madrid, the officer had told the British ambassador that if the Germans learned of his mission he would be killed the moment he returned to Italy.
An all-night meeting in the Lisbon residence of the British ambassador revealed that the two sides were miles apart. The Italian emissary understood his mission as arranging to abandon Germany and then joining Britain and the United States in the war; the two Allied representatives made clear that Italy’s only choice was between complete capitulation and total war. “We are not in a position to make terms,” Castellano acknowledged after Smith read aloud a proposed military armistice. Before leaving for home in the early hours—carrying with him a special radio transmitter, previously installed in the British embassy, which would allow the Italian general staff in Rome to secretly contact Allied headquarters—Castellano drew up a map that set out the location of some 400,000 German troops in Italy.
What followed was a melodrama of several acts, as Harold Macmillan described it, that included Rome sending another and unexpected emissary to meet with Smith and Strong. With Castellano stalled while waiting for the exchange between Italy and Chile to take place, General Giacomo Zanussi appeared in Lisbon—accompanied, apparently as a gesture of good faith, by a high-level British prisoner of war, General Adrian Carton de Wiart—with instructions from his government to move on to London as soon as possible. But the British ambassador, thinking the second Italian general would only muddy negotiations under way with Castellano, instead hid him for the time being in a Lisbon flat. Eventually Zanussi flew to Algiers with Smith and Strong, then moved to Sicily, where on September 3, in an olive grove near Syracuse, General Castellano finally signed for the Italian government an armistice of so-called short terms dealing only with military matters as against the long terms of an unconditional surrender. On September 8, less than a month since the first peace overtures in Lisbon, Eisenhower announced over Radio Algiers Italy’s full capitulation. The following day Allied troops of Operation Avalanche landed on the Italian mainland at Salerno. On October 13, with German forces occupying central and northern parts of the country, the new Italian government declared war on its former ally.
Earlier an incident that had taken place during General Zanussi’s strange mission to Portugal was brought to conclusion. Perhaps thinking them useful in surrender negotiations, the officer had deposited at Lisbon’s Italian legation two packets of valuable information about German forces in Italy. The Italian minister, realizing the danger involved, was eager to get the packets off his hands, and coded messages flew back and forth to the Allies before Harold Macmillan sent his press attaché to Lisbon to retrieve them. In the guise of a Spaniard, he arrived at the legation and, as Macmillan wrote, “obtained the two packages from the trembling hands of Signor Prunas” and carried them safely to Allied headquarters.
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After Badoglio replaced Mussolini, Hitler, worried about the Italians seeking a separate peace, had sent Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Germany’s military intelligence, the Abwehr, to Italy to survey the situation. In a secret meeting in Venice, Canaris consented to a request of General Cesare Amé, head of Italy’s military intelligence, to join in masking Italy’s planned departure from the war. In a conference attended by intelligence members of both Axis nations, Amé vigorously affirmed Badoglio’s commitment to the war as a Nazi ally. Canaris went along with the deception in a report on the conference written after he returned to Germany, though he took the precaution of having an underling attach his name to it. Hitler, though not fully convinced of Badoglio’s loyalty, made no effort to remove him from power. Thus Italy’s surrender to the Allies was an unwelcome surprise.
The Abwehr chief’s duplicitous role in the scheme is understandable in light of his long involvement in a German anti-Nazi opposition group with roots going back to the 1930s. As it was later dubbed by the Gestapo, the Schwarze Kapelle—the Black Orchestra—numbered among its members aristocrats, diplomats, businessmen, and such leading military figures as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel as well as Canaris. The conspirators’ aim, as it ultimately developed, was a coup d’état in which Hitler would be assassinated, top Nazi leaders arrested, and a military government installed in Berlin that would sue for peace. To gain support from the Western Allies and favorable surrender terms, the Schwarze Kapelle betrayed important details of German military planning and capability through contact with the Allies in the neutral settings of Bern, Stockholm, and, in 1943, Lisbon.
In July and August one of the plotters, Otto John, a lawyer with Lufthansa airlines who also carried out intelligence missions for the Abwehr, was sent to both Madrid and Lisbon to see if communication links could be established to Washington and London. Over dinner in Madrid with William Hohenthal, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agent under cover as a military attaché at the American embassy, John confided that an attempt would soon be made to change the régime in Berlin. What was needed for the effort was some indication from the Allied high command that German field marshals would receiv
e the same lenient treatment given Marshal Badoglio when Italy left the war. The evening ended with Hohenthal agreeing to stay in contact and giving John a secret telephone number to the embassy.
John’s Lufthansa position made travel about the Iberian peninsula easy and above suspicion, and earlier he had met in Lisbon with Graham Maingot, an agent of Britain’s MI6, the country’s Secret Intelligence Service operating overseas. The two had left the city by car and walked country lanes to avoid observation, the British operative convinced of John’s authenticity but explaining to him why others might be wary:
I see no reason why I should not believe you… . But there are people here in Portugal claiming to belong to the German opposition who would like to mislead us. Before the war German opposition emissaries came to London and told us that they were in touch with German generals who wished to overthrow Hitler. But what happened? Nothing. The German generals are fighting for Hitler and they’re not doing it badly either.
It was necessary, added Maingot, for the German resistance to “prove itself by doing something if it wishes to get a hearing in Lisbon.”
In February 1944, the planned coup near at hand, John returned to Madrid and Lisbon to try to establish some link with the Allied military leadership. In Madrid, William Hohenthal said he would look into the possibility of a connection with Eisenhower; in Lisbon, however, John hit a stonewall. Another officer of MI6’s Lisbon station, Rita Winsor, met John in a car parked on a dark side street and, as they drove through the city, told him that instructions from London were that all contact with the German opposition should cease. The war would be decided only on the battlefield. After delivering this disheartening news, Winsor invited John to her home for a farewell drink. He would return to Lisbon under quite different circumstances, but for the time being his work as an emissary of the anti-Nazi resistance was over.
However, in the German minister in Portugal, Baron Oswald von Hoyningen-Huene, the Schwarze Kapelle had long had a highly placed member in Lisbon. In the summer of 1943 Hoyningen-Huene was the link in an invitation from Admiral Canaris to the head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, to meet on neutral ground, possibly in Portugal, to discuss an alliance between the German conspirators and British intelligence. Menzies was prepared to chance the danger involved, but Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was not. He vetoed both the meeting and a response to the invitation on grounds it would stoke the fear of the Russians, if they learned of it, that Britain would seek a separate peace with Germany.
As perhaps part of an attempt by Canaris to sway Menzies’s agreement to a meeting, in that summer of 1943 an Abwehr officer turned over to the MI6 station in Lisbon a detailed dossier about Hitler’s secret V1 and V2 rocket program under way at Peenemünde, on an island in the Baltic Sea. Germans later considered the material, which came to be known as the Lisbon Report, as the most devastating betrayal of the Third Reich during the war. The report confirmed other information about the rocket program available to the British and Americans through intercepts of German wireless communications, and on August 17 and 18, 1943, the RAF staged a massive assault on Peenemünde.
With the Allies committed to unconditional surrender, the Schwarze Kapelle’s attempts to trade information for aid and concessions had no chance of success. Likewise, the plotters’ efforts to remove Hitler produced a series of failures. When a fourth assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, went awry—a bomb placed beneath the Führer’s desk exploded but only wounded him—most of the conspirators, among them Canaris, were rounded up and executed. Rommel was allowed the questionable honor of taking his own life.
A final German attempt in Lisbon to reach the Western Allies, this initiated by some members of the military high command following the Normandy landings, took place in or about August 1944. Heinz Carl Weber, identified as the figure in charge of German mineral purchasing in Portugal, contacted the American and British embassies in Lisbon through, presumably, Hoyningen-Huene or key subordinates. According to a document prepared by the American OSS and circulated to the president, the secretary of state, and others in Washington, Weber said that German general headquarters had asked him to determine the response of the United States to the surrender of German forces to the Western Allies, “provided the latter act at once to occupy the Reich and keep out the Soviet.” The OSS added that “the report may merit attention in view of the channels employed and the apparent sincerity of the source.” There is no evidence, however, that Weber received a reply; if he did, it would only have restated the Allied position of surrender without conditions. The war, in any case, went on for another nine months.
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Otto John, who had returned to Berlin in anticipation of Hitler’s assassination, escaped Gestapo retribution by fleeing to Madrid on a Lufthansa flight. “A dagger’s the right way to murder a man like Hitler,” a Spanish friend bitterly admonished him. “If one of you had the courage to do that, the coup would have succeeded. What you did was wrong and too late.” He also told John that he could not stay in Madrid; the Spanish police would surely hand him over to the Gestapo. John considered going to the American embassy, meeting again with William Hohenthal, and asking for asylum. Instead he chose, with the help of British friends, to try to reach Lisbon and then London, where he hoped, through the medium of BBC broadcasts, to provide a full account of the German resistance.
After a series of moves in Madrid to avoid detection, John was driven by a man from the British embassy to the Spanish port of Vigo, from where he was transported to a village on the frontier with Portugal. Before dawn the following day he was taken by rowboat across the Minho River to waiting Portuguese, who provided him with breakfast. When a large car marked with a Union Jack appeared, John proved his identity to the Portuguese driver with a method agreed upon in Madrid—a matchbox with a hundred-peseta note inside—and was promptly taken to Lisbon. At the British embassy, his identity again demonstrated with the matchbox, he was told he would be lodged in a small inn outside Lisbon until he was sent on to London.
A Portuguese agent working with the embassy led him to the inn, where a meal was provided. But John’s room turned out to be a corner of a barn filled with straw and corn. He was next taken to the agent’s home near Lisbon, where his movements were confined to an inner courtyard. Days passed, and though the agent preached patience, John began thinking the British had little interest in getting him to London.
One evening two members of the Portuguese secret police burst into the home and demanded John’s identity card. After claiming he was an RAF officer who had been shot down over Germany and was on his way to Britain, he was taken to a prison on the edge of Lisbon—the medieval fortress of Aljube, he later learned—while his story was checked. The worst that could befall him, John assumed, was internment in Portugal, in every sense a better fate than that of his fellow conspirators in Germany.
During questioning in Aljube he held to his RAF story. But when the Portuguese interrogator produced a suitcase that had been forwarded from Madrid without John’s knowledge and found in the Portuguese agent’s home, the game was up: in the suitcase was a dinner jacket with the label of a German tailor. John admitted his true identity but said he was in Madrid at the time of the attempt on Hitler’s life and had fled to Lisbon to escape the reach of the Gestapo. He asked for political asylum in Portugal.
The interrogator had him write down what he had said, and left him alone to do so. At the same time John wrote a letter to Salazar, hoping to gain his support for asylum. From the interrogator he learned that the police had stumbled on him when they came to the agent’s home to arrest him for supposed Communist connections. John was returned to his dismal prison cell and days passed while, seemingly, his asylum request was under consideration. He would eventually discover that, after Portugal had refused a German request for extradition, the Gestapo intended to abduct him in Portugal and bring him, dead or alive, to Germany. When the British embassy got wind of the Gestapo’s plans, it had contacted the Portuguese minist
er of the interior on John’s behalf, who in turn said Portugal could not guarantee his long-term security and he should be moved to England. Rita Winsor, John’s earlier MI6 contact in Lisbon, remembered him and prodded embassy officials to take action on his behalf.
One day, without preliminaries, John was taken from the prison to the embassy, given a British emergency passport, and put up for a night with a British couple. The next day, accompanied by a friend of Rita Winsor’s, he was placed on a plane to Gibraltar—but when the plane could not land due to weather it returned to Lisbon. The next night Rita Winsor herself took him to a flying boat on the Tagus for a flight to England. After brief internment, the British set Otto John to work advising on BBC broadcasts directed to German troops and interviewing prisoners of war.
6
Living There
I know of no capital city that is pleasanter for an exile to live in than Lisbon.
—Hugh Muir, European Junction
For Denis de Rougemont, the Swiss-born writer, the Lisbon route from war ultimately led to one destination, as he made emphatically clear in a journal entry on September 10, 1940: “White and blue in the light of the immense Atlantic freedom with all its flags snapping and its streets leading to the sky, the city of seven hills denies the war, forgets Europe. Tomorrow we embark for America.” And the next day he indeed boarded the Exeter for New York, leaving Lisbon and Europe behind. Still, there were always exceptions in the determined rush to move on, whether to America or elsewhere. Some refugees who reached Lisbon purposely prolonged their stay there, even decided it was an agreeable place to sit out some or all of the war. And throughout the period there were those for whom the city was a goal rather than a stopping off place, and they settled into long stretches of residence.