by Ronald Weber
The sheer mechanics of monitoring the content of internal and external media were also daunting. Books were examined by a panel of censors, most of them military officers, while in Portuguese newspaper offices censors were permanently in place. Surprisingly, given Portugal’s high rate of illiteracy, Lisbon in wartime had six daily morning newspapers and two evening papers, and in the country as a whole there were hundreds of newspapers and periodicals. An army of censors was needed, and they had to be given broad instruction about sensitive or dangerous subjects, then be able to apply what they were told to specific stories.
With foreign publications, even getting hold of material to inspect could prove difficult. When the head of Portuguese press censorship, a Colonel Alvaro Barreto, found he lacked funds to buy foreign newspapers, he ordered news agencies to provide them free. Then, overwhelmed by the number and variety of English-language papers, he decided that only some foreign publications would undergo censorship, with the list changed periodically. Since this meant that many non-English papers would also escape inspection, the British embassy’s press attaché, Marcus Cheke, complained. Colonel Barreto’s supposedly serious rejoinder was that since he and his workers could read only English in addition to Portuguese, there was no point of bothering with publications in other languages.
There was difficulty too in keeping absolute control of newspapers and magazines brought into the country by Portuguese fishermen (who could turn a tidy profit by buying them at sea from British fishermen, then reselling them when they returned home), merchant seamen, and passengers arriving on foreign ships and air flights. Nazi agents hunting for uncensored information staked out Lisbon’s wharves and landing facilities and were known to pay as much as sixty dollars for a copy of the New York Times, with a single copy of Life magazine going for double the amount. Such publications were often badly dated by the time they reached enemy hands—a problem the Germans got around with American newspapers when they learned that the State Department furnished the Lisbon ministry with several current papers that were typically sent in microfilm form to save space and weight on Clipper flights, with a Lisbon photographer then enlarging the film. The Germans merely paid the photographer for extra sets and sent them winging off to Berlin.
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In the war’s early period Germany’s newspapers and magazines overflowed Portuguese newsstands, and its radio broadcasts commanded the airwaves. Nazi pamphlets were routinely placed in trams, cafés, hotels, barbershops, hair salons, and the waiting rooms of doctors and dentists. The popular illustrated fortnightly magazine Signal, published in Portuguese and other languages and sold cheaply throughout Europe, had a wide audience for accounts of Nazi military triumphs and lavish picture displays of contented populations in conquered countries. When the British photographer Cecil Beaton leafed through some of the German propaganda magazines in Lisbon, he was struck by the high quality of the illustrations.
Their photographs of the war [he wrote in his diary], both in colour and black and white, are so much more original than ours. Not only do they know the value of restraint in colour, but their attitude is so bold. They show dramatic blurs—pictures taken in semi-darkness, in smoke, in rain or fog that create a tremendous dramatic effect.
There was a bewildering contradiction, Beaton noted too, between the “contemporary spirit” displayed in the magazines and the constant Nazi railing against degenerate modern art.
Portuguese newspapers and radio stations could save the costs of subscribing to news services by accepting what Germany’s Deutsches Nactrichtenbüro (DNB) provided free of charge. The news agency’s Lisbon bureau recruited many of its staff from among Portuguese journalists, in return gaining an advantage in placing favorable stories in local newspapers and magazines. As for photographs, Portuguese publications could get British pictures by asking at the embassy while the Germans passed out theirs without waiting for requests. For journalists wanting them, the Germans provided language courses without charge. Bookstore windows in Lisbon and elsewhere in Portugal displayed stacks of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the copies given away to the shops or sold at small cost. Accompanying the media blitz were German “tourists” and “commercial travelers” who fanned out across the country with whispering campaigns of how much Portugal stood to benefit from a Nazi victory and, the bleak other side of the coin, how a British triumph would surely mean the end of Salazar and the dismantling of the overseas empire. For the Portuguese academic, business, and government elite, junkets to Germany were arranged to show at firsthand the achievements of national socialism.
The British counterattack against German intriguers, as they were known in the London press, was slow to get off the ground. Lecture tours of Portugal by public men, arranged by the British Council, were believed an effective tool—as noted in a press report of a series of talks in early 1940 by Lord Harlech on such carefully orchestrated subjects as Portuguese and British monuments and English university life—for forging “cultural relationships.” But the report acknowledged that the Germans made a stronger propaganda drive to “force sympathy for their cause and ideology” by flooding Portuguese schools with attractive literature of all sorts. Hugh Muir, while he was working as the Continental Daily Mail correspondent in Paris when German troops reached the city gates in June 1940, reported that British propaganda at the time consisted of little more than readings over a local radio station of Pride and Prejudice and articles on cricket and India’s trade figures. In Lisbon, British propaganda continued on a largely cultural course by promoting accounts of English life presumably appealing to Portuguese taste—sport, royalty, rural affairs, military figures, famous men such as Churchill. It backed away from political matters considered sensitive in the country—discussions of democratic society, for one—as well as overt anti-Italian or anti-German declarations.
The Duke of Kent’s appearance at the Portuguese centenary celebration of 1940, extensively covered by the Portuguese press and recorded in movie newsreels shown about the country, was considered a major propaganda triumph. So too on the exposition grounds in Belém was the Hall of the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, which the British had adorned with documents, portraits, and banners highlighting the age-old links between the two nations. Favorable treatment of the centenary in the London Times was duly reproduced by Lisbon papers. Victory of another sort came in June 1941 when a group of Oxford dons traveled to the University of Coimbra to present Salazar with an honorary doctorate, the degree bestowed with an address in Latin and Salazar replying in kind. Earlier the dictator had steered clear of the award since he had turned down honorary degrees from German universities. The event was “first class propaganda,” the British ambassador in Lisbon gleefully informed London. “The Germans are livid.”
Still, unambiguous propaganda triumphs were few and far between, leaving great swaths of time in which—as David Eccles concluded from his position within the British embassy—the “demented atmosphere in Portugal played into the hands of the Germans.” He decided “the best personal reply an Englishman could make was a show of exuberant confidence in our ultimate victory.” What this meant in daily life was the pleasant duty of taking attractive women to the best restaurants and either giving or attending a party nearly every evening. When Eccles invited a woman he met on the beach to lunch and she turned out to be the daughter of a German military attaché, the news got back to Salazar—who passed it off by saying it seemed Eccles was enjoying Lisbon society, and offering him use of a rose-colored palace in the event he was thinking of giving a ball. “He approved our confidence in ourselves,” Eccles decided about the incident. “The Germans could not compete in light-heartedness and, although some members of the British colony were shocked, the social bravado paid off.”
In time Britain challenged Germany in more typical propaganda fashion by producing an illustrated magazine distributed throughout Portugal, subsidizing Portuguese publications, providing increased funding for its Exchange Telegraph’s cable news service in Portu
gal, introducing Reuters news service into the country, and through broadcasting the BBC’s Portuguese-language news programs. A grant from the British Council enabled the Anglo-Portuguese News to shift from fortnightly to weekly publication for the duration of the war, while Marcus Cheke led groups of Portuguese journalists on tours of England.
After the British began enjoying some military success in North Africa in 1941, the Lisbon propagandists finally had some war stories to boast about—and surveys showed British accounts getting more play in local newspapers and on radio stations than German reports. This reversed an earlier trend in which DNB and the Vichy-controlled French service Havas had been dominant. Theater showings of British feature films began making some headway against Portuguese censorship, though a plan to send traveling film vans into rural areas was scrapped out of concern the Germans might do the same and the government would put a stop to both.
Overall the British may have gained a measure of sympathetic media treatment simply as a reaction against the Reich’s insistent bluster about ill treatment by the Portuguese. As early as the summer of 1940 the German minister in Lisbon was firing off sharp protests about pro-Allied stories, the failure of many Portuguese periodicals to carry German propaganda, and a similar failure of the government to close down publications considered offensive. Between June 1940 and June 1944 Germany submitted more than a hundred formal press protests compared to nine by Britain.
A persistent problem for Lisbon’s British propagandists, on the other hand, came from accounts in London publications that Portuguese authorities viewed as critical of Salazar—and British writers and journalists defended as simply factual reporting about how his repressive regime functioned. Marcus Cheke, on the receiving end of a stream of Portuguese complaints, pleaded for a softer tone from London, even occasional flattery of Salazar and his works. (Cheke’s scholarly 1938 biography of the figure whose imposing statue stands at the head of the Avenida da Liberdade had carried a blunt title: Dictator of Portugal: A Life of the Marquis of Pombal, 1699–1782.) He kept pointing out that, for his propaganda efforts in Portugal to go forward at all, a working relationship with the government was a basic need. In London the Foreign Office mildly cautioned the British press to treat the Portuguese regime at least with some care.
BBC radio broadcasts from London equally drew Portuguese ire. A particular issue arose over the presence of what the government considered anti-Salazar broadcasters slanting the news service coming into Portugal. Removing one of them, António Cortesao, a Portuguese, became a heated demand, and under pressure from the regime as well as Lisbon’s British embassy the BBC sacked him. A further irritant was the BBC’s favorable treatment of Britain’s wartime alliance with Russia, though here—as in most printed and broadcast disputes—London officials refused to wholly tailor their work to fit Portuguese attitudes. In July 1942 The Economist pointed to an evident lack of balance in Salazar’s renewed complaints, during a radio address to the Portuguese people, about the Allied blockade and the Anglo-Soviet relationship. In speaking of the blockade, said the magazine, the prime minister should take into account the German
U-boat campaign, which had also helped turn shipping into “the one great intractable problem of the war effort. Portugal, as a maritime Power, cannot expect to be totally unaffected by it.” As for the Soviet alliance, at a time when Russia on one side of Europe and the Anglo-Saxon powers on the other stood between Portugal and “the most ruthless, godless and soulless tyranny mankind has ever known,” the “terrors of Bolshevism might with rather more realism be allowed to fade a little.” Beyond this, the magazine went on, Russia would be a major postwar power regardless of the pact with Britain, and it was in the interests of Portugal and other nations to look ahead to drawing it into a peaceful new Europe rather than walled off in hostile isolation.
Nonetheless Nazi insistence that the British blockade harmed the economy—that free of it Portugal would rank among the richest of countries—remained throughout the war a potent weapon of German propaganda. Equally telling was the belief pushed by the Nazis that the Allied war aim of overthrowing dictators in Berlin and Rome also extended to Salazar in Lisbon—and that the allegiance with Russia meant that, with an Allied victory, a Bolshevik wave would sweep across Europe. When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, some members of the Portuguese Legion, a voluntary adult militia formed by Salazar in 1936, were vocally eager to join the Wehrmacht on the eastern front. Since Spain raised the Blue Division for combat, German circles expected that Portugal would follow suit. But when the German minister in Lisbon called on him, Salazar skirted the issue by saying he would give consideration only to a demonstration by the Legion in support of the German effort. According to a report to London by the British ambassador, when the German military attaché in Lisbon asked Portuguese authorities for direct aid in putting together a Legion force for Russia, he was declared persona non grata.
The closest Portugal came to joining the struggle was to send a young military officer as an observer with German forces. His reports to Lisbon, so it was said, strengthened Salazar’s commitment to neutrality by convincing him the German cause was hopeless. Still, British propagandists had to keep hammering home to the Portuguese that, despite the Anglo-Russian alliance, a steadfast political distinction existed between English democracy and Soviet communism. An unexpected ally in moderating Portuguese attitudes toward Russia appeared in the spring of 1942 when the Catholic Patriarch of Lisbon, Manuel Conçalves Cerejeira, instructed the country’s clergy that while preaching to their congregations they were not to identify Communist ideology with the Russian nation. Nor should they, on the other hand, identify anti-communism as the crusade of any great power. According to press reports, in his directives Cardinal Cerejeira was trying to halt parish sermons that had become so anti-Russian as to be effectively anti-British and pro-German.
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Some small-scale British efforts to counteract German propaganda were easily arranged yet could have disappointing consequences. When the British matched the Germans with war-photograph displays in shop windows in Lisbon and elsewhere—an attempt at getting around media censorship of military news—the London Times judged the pictures so dull, static, and insignificant that no Fleet Street photo editor would bother looking at them, let alone the passing Portuguese. By contrast, the “thrilling action pictures” of German displays were said to “hold the unwilling attention of everybody, and there is a bustling crowd round them all day long.” The differing appeal of the displays was made all the more galling by the newspaper’s disclosure that Britain had gotten window space usually without rental charge while Germany had to pay at high rates.
In a controversy over wearing military badges in public, on the other hand, the British effortlessly carried the day. When the government bowed to German protests and declared that Royal Air Force badges could not be worn on Lisbon streets, the order was not enforced. Yet when Germany began a Luftwaffe campaign, police confiscated the badges. The unequal treatment, as British propagandists explained it, was the result of government fear that other Portuguese would rip off the German badges. Early in the war an American correspondent reported seeing RAF emblems everywhere in Lisbon but noticed only a single Luftwaffe symbol, this worn by a newspaperman in the office of what he considered the pro-German Diário de Noticias.
German black propaganda (by one definition, propaganda masking its true origin, as against white propaganda which acknowledged it) was employed as readily in Lisbon as the white variety, with the usual mixed bag of results. A German-produced edition of London’s Daily Mail, sent to Lisbon by air, was an exact replica of that day’s paper save for an article labeling the Portuguese army as cowardly. Meant to strike a blow at the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, the forgery backfired when British officials quickly publicized it, thereby bringing it to the attention of Portuguese who had never seen the paper. A German deception that had the desired effect was an announcement placed in a Lisbon newspaper about well-p
aying jobs for men, and giving the address of the British consulate. When a large number of applicants showed up, the consulate was left trying to explain that it knew nothing about the openings. The same trick played on the American consulate brought the same result. Another successful German scheme was to buy up and hoard basic foodstuffs, then let it about that the shortages were due to the Allied sea blockade.
Yet despite making inroads here and there, German propaganda over the course of the war was unable to seriously erode broad popular support for Britain within Portugal. If anything, the Reich pushed its agenda too tenaciously, trying to force rather than cajole the Portuguese into Nazi arms. A notable instance came in September 1942 when the German legation invited movie critics and other Lisbon residents to a first showing of a propaganda film about the disastrous failure of an Allied raid at Dieppe on the northern coast of France. The Associated Press reported—and got through censors—that critics in the audience were unimpressed by the curtly titled How We Dealt with the British at Dieppe. Augusto Fraga, one of Lisbon’s leading film critics, believed the Germans had doctored the work. “In order to produce this film,” he reported, “they had to bring in a lot of clever studio work and make-ups, which no longer pass unnoticed by movie fans.” He went on: “The only real things actually shown were British prisoners being marched in the streets—some in underwear—and the tremendous destruction the raiders did until their re-embarkation.” Fraga was equally critical of a figure who commented on the film: “He meant to help the poor show by joking about each scene… . Such statements, aimed to make the audience laugh … found no or little response.” About one scene, called by Fraga the most impressive in the film, the commentator said nothing—and the critic came away with a feeling of his own that was clearly the reverse of the unalloyed German triumph the film intended to convey. The scene revealed the