Aristides De Sousa Mendes

Aristides de Sousa Mendes do Amaral e Abranches () GCC, OL (July 19, 1885 – April 3, 1954) was a Portuguese consul during World War II.

As the Portuguese consul-general in the French city of Bordeaux, he defied the orders of António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo regime, issuing visas and passports to an undetermined number of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, including Jews. For this, Sousa Mendes was punished by the Salazar regime with one year of inactivity with the right to one half of his rank's pay, being obliged subsequently to be retired. However, he ended up never being expelled from the foreign service nor forced to retire and he received a full consul salary until his death in 1954. One of Sousa Mendes most sympathetic biographers, Rui Afonso, has reckoned that he continued to receive a salary at least three times that of a teacher.

Sousa Mendes was vindicated in 1988, more than a decade after the Carnation Revolution, which toppled the Estado Novo.

The number of visas issued by Sousa Mendes is disputed. Yad Vashem historian Avraham Milgram thinks that it was probably Harry Ezratty who was the first to mention in an article published in 1964 that Sousa Mendes had saved 30,000 refugees, of which 10,000 were Jews, a number which has since been repeated automatically by journalists and academics. Milgram says that Ezratty, imprudently, took the total number of Jewish refugees who passed through Portugal and ascribed it to the work of Aristides de Sousa Mendes. According to Milgram “the discrepancy between the reality and the myth of the number of visas granted by Sousa Mendes is great”. A similar opinion is shared by British historian Neill Lochery, by the Portuguese ambassador João Hall Themido, by the Portuguese Ambassador Carlos Fernandes and by the Portuguese historian José Hermano Saraiva. On the other hand, French writer, Eric Lebreton argued that “Milgram did not account for the visas that were delivered in Bayonne, Hendaye and Toulouse”.Lebreton p.231 In 2015, Olivia Mattis, musicologist and Board President of the Sousa Mendes Foundation in the United States, published the findings of the Sousa Mendes Foundation stating that "tens of thousands" of visa recipients is a figure in the correct order of magnitude.Olivia Mattis, "Sousa Mendes's List: From Names to Families", Prism: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators 7 (Spring 2015), note 3.

For his efforts to save Jewish refugees, Sousa Mendes was recognized by Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, the first diplomat to be so honoured, in 1966.

Portuguese diplomats such as Ambassador João Hall Themido and Ambassador Carlos Fernandes have argued that Sousa Mendes actions have been inflated and twisted in order to attack Salazar. Similar opinion was voiced by historian Tom Gallagher who argues that evidence that Sousa Mendes efforts were especially directed towards fleeing Jews is also speculative. British, Americans and Portuguese, often people with means, figured prominently as recipients of visas. Gallagher thinks that the disproportionate attention given to Sousa Mendes suggests that wartime history is being used as a political weapon in contemporary Portugal.

On 9 June 2020, Portugal granted official recognition to Sousa Mendes. Parliament decided a monument in the National Pantheon should bear his name. In 2017, in the Portuguese border town of Vilar Formoso, a memorial museum was opened, known as Vilar Formoso Fronteira da Paz (Frontier of Peace) recording the experiences of refugees entering Portugal, many of whom had been given visas by Sousa Mendes.

Early life

Aristides de Sousa Mendes was born in Cabanas de Viriato, in the district of Viseu, Centro Region of Portugal, on July 19, 1885, shortly after midnight. His twin brother César, born a few minutes earlier, had a July 18 birthday. Their ancestry included a notable aristocratic line: their mother, Maria Angelina Ribeiro de Abranches de Abreu Castelo-Branco, was a maternal illegitimate granddaughter of the 2nd Viscount of Midões, a lower rural aristocracy title. Their father, José de Sousa Mendes, was a judge on the Coimbra Court of Appeals. César served as Foreign Minister in 1932, in the early days of António de Oliveira Salazar's regime. Their younger brother, Jose Paulo, became a naval officer.

Sousa Mendes and his twin studied law at the University of Coimbra, and each obtained his degree in 1908. In that same year, Sousa Mendes married his childhood sweetheart, Maria Angelina Coelho de Sousa (born August 20, 1888). They eventually had fourteen children, born in the various countries in which he served. Shortly after his marriage, Sousa Mendes began the consular officer career that would take him and his family around the world. Early in his career, he served in Demerara, Zanzibar, Brazil, Spain, the United States, and Belgium.

In August 1919, while posted in Brazil, he was "temporarily suspended by the Foreign Ministry, which regarded him as hostile to the republican regime." Subsequently, "he had financial problems and was forced to take out a loan in order to provide for his family needs." He returned home to Portugal where his son Pedro Nuno was born in Coimbra in April 1920.

In 1921, Sousa Mendes was assigned to the Portuguese consulate in San Francisco, and two more of his children were born there.

In 1923, he angered some members of the Portuguese-American community because of his insistence that the Oakland's brotherhood of the Cult of the Holy Spirit should make a contribution to a Brazilian charity. Sousa Mendes decided to publish his arguments in local newspapers accusing the members of the brotherhood of lack of patriotism and disrespect for Portugal sparkling a dispute where both sides used the local press to attack each another. Sousa Mendes was instructed by the Foreign Office to stop insisting on something that was not part of his work as a consul and that the local Portuguese community was free to choose to which charities they wished to support. But Sousa Mendes ignored the orders and kept on publishing articles criticizing the members of the brotherhood and also banned the Portuguese notaries from performing any further services to the consulate. Ultimately, the conflict led to the US Department of State cancelling his consular exequatur and ask the Portuguese Government to replace Sousa Mendes as consul. While in San Francisco, Sousa Mendes helped establish a Portuguese Studies program at the University of California at Berkeley.

In May 1926, a coup d'état replaced the republic in Portugal with a military dictatorship, a regime that according to Sousa Mendes "had been greeted with delight" in Portugal. He supported the new regime at first and his career prospects improved. In March 1927, Sousa Mendes was assigned to serve as the Consul in Vigo in Spain, where he helped the military dictatorship neutralize political refugees.

In 1929 he was sent to Antwerp, Belgium to serve as Dean of the Consular Corps.

The year of 1934 was a tragic year for the Sousa Mendes family with the loss of two of their children: Raquel, barely one year old, and Manuel, who had just graduated from the University of Louvain.

In 1935 during the Brussels World Fair Sousa Mendes decided to publicly criticize the Portuguese Government for the low level of representation in the world fair. The Minister Armindo Monteiro considered this to be a serious lack of discipline and Sousa Mendes was again object of disciplinary proceedings that ended up with him being dismissed from the board of The House of Portugal in Antwerp. In that same year, Sousa Mendes was also investigated for tardiness in the transferring of consular funds to the Foreign Office in Lisbon and he had to ask the support of his brother César to provide him with the money needed to settle the lack of funds.

In 1938, he was assigned to the post of Consul-General of Bordeaux, France, with jurisdiction over the whole of the Southwest of France.

World War II and Circular 14

In 1932, the Portuguese dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar began, and by 1933, the secret police, the Surveillance and State Defense Police, PVDE, had been created. According to historian Avraham Milgram, by 1938, Salazar "knew the Nazis' approach to the 'Jewish question'. From fears that aliens might undermine the regime, entry to Portugal was severely limited. Toward this end, the apparatus of the PVDE was extended with its International Department given greater control over border patrol and the entry of aliens. Presumably, most aliens wishing to enter Portugal at that time were Jews." Portugal during World War II, like its European counterparts, adopted tighter immigration policies, preventing refugees from settling in the country. Circular 10, of 28 October 1938, addressed to consular representatives, deemed that settling was forbidden to Jews, allowing entrance only on a tourist visa for thirty days.

On 9 November 1938, the Nazi government of Germany began open war against its Jewish citizens with the pogrom known as Kristallnacht, with over a thousand synagogues damaged or destroyed, thousands of Jewish businesses damaged, 30,000 Jews arrested and at least 91 Jews murdered. On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, home at that time to the largest Jewish community in the world, precipitating the start of World War II. Salazar reacted by sending a telegram to the Portuguese Embassy in Berlin ordering that it should be made clear to the German Reich that Portuguese law did not allow any distinction based on race, and therefore Portuguese Jewish citizens could not be discriminated against.

The German invasion of Poland led France and the United Kingdom to declare war on Germany. The number of refugees trying to make use of Portugal's neutrality as an escape route increased, and between the months of September and December approximately 9,000 refugees entered Portugal. Passport forgery and false statements were common. The regime felt the need for tighter control. By 1939, the police had already dismantled several criminal networks responsible for passport forgery and several consuls had been expelled from service for falsifying passports.

On 11 November 1939, the Portuguese government sent Circular 14 to all Portuguese consuls throughout Europe, stating the categories of war refugees whom the PVDE considered to be "inconvenient or dangerous."Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Portugal, ''Spared Lives: The Actions of Three Portuguese Diplomats in World War II'', Documentary Exhibition, Catalogue, September 2000, p.81. The Dispatch allowed consuls to continue granting Portuguese transit visas, but established that in the case of "Foreigners of indefinite or contested nationality, the Stateless, Russian Citizens, Holders of a Nansen passport, or Jews expelled from their countries and those alleging to embark from a Portuguese port without a consular visa for their country of destination, or air or sea tickets, or an Embarkation Guarantee from the respective companies, the consuls needed to ask permission in advance of the Foreign Ministry head office in Lisbon." With Europe at war, this meant that refugees fleeing from the Nazis would have serious difficulties.

Historian Neill Lochery asserts that Circular 14 "was not issued out of thin air" and that this type of barrier was not unique to Portugal and with the country's very limited economic resources it was viewed as necessary. It was economic reasons rather than ideological reasons that made the Portuguese avoid accepting more refugees says Lochery. Milgram expressed similar views, asserting that Portugal's regime did not distinguish between Jews and non-Jews but rather between immigrant Jews who came and had the means to leave the country, and those lacking those means. Portugal prevented Jews from putting down roots in the country not because they were Jews but because the regime feared foreign influence in general, and feared the entrance of Bolsheviks and left-wing agitators fleeing from Germany. Milgram believes that antisemitic ideological patterns had no hold in the ruling structure of the "Estado Novo" and ''a fortiori'' in the various strata of Portuguese society. Milgram also says that modern anti-Semitism failed "to establish even a toehold in Portugal" while it grew racist and virulent elsewhere in early twentieth-century Europe. Salazar`s policies towards the Jews seem to have been favourable and consistent." Nevertheless, although it was not anti-Semitism that motivated the Portuguese government, but the danger of mass emigration to the country, the outcome of the border policy made life difficult for Jews fleeing Nazism.

Sousa Mendes' disobedience to the orders of the Salazar dictatorship

There are different views on the uniqueness of Sousa Mendes' actions: According to Dr. Mordecai Paldiel, past Director of the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, "In Portugal of those days, it was unthinkable for a diplomatic official, especially in a sensitive post, to disobey clear-cut instructions and get away with it." However, according to Yad Vashem historian Avraham Milgram "issuing visas in contravention of instructions was widespread at Portuguese consulates all over Europe" and that "this form of insubordination was rife in consular circles." Sousa Mendes began disobeying Circular 14 almost immediately, on the grounds that it was an inhumane and racist directive.

The process that ended with Sousa Mendes’ discharge from his consular career began with two visas issued during the Phoney War and long before the invasion of France: the first issued on 28 November 1939 to Professor Arnold Wiznitzer, an Austrian historian who had been stripped of his nationality by the Nuremberg Laws, and the second on 1 March 1940 to the Spanish Republican Eduardo Neira Laporte, an anti-Franco activist living in France. Sousa Mendes granted the visas first, and only after granting the visas did he ask for the required approvals. Sousa Mendes was reprimanded and warned in writing that "any new transgression or violation on this issue will be considered disobedience and will entail a disciplinary procedure where it will not be possible to overlook that you have repeatedly committed acts which have entailed warnings and reprimands."

When Sousa Mendes issued these visas, it was a deliberate act of disobedience to the decree of an authoritarian dictatorship. "Here was a unique act by a man who believed his religion imposed certain obligations", said Paldiel. "He said, 'I'm saving innocent lives,' as simply as he might have said, 'Come, walk with me in my garden.'"

It is also by this time that Andrée Cibial, a French pianist and singer, disturbed Sousa Mendes' marriage. Andrée became his mistress and eventually got pregnant, which she publicly announced during a Sunday's mass at Riberac cathedral.

On 10 May 1940, Germany launched a blitzkrieg offensive against France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and millions of refugees took to the roads. On 15 May, Sousa Mendes issued transit visas to Maria Tavares, a Luxembourg citizen of Portuguese origin, and to her husband Paul Miny, also a Luxembourger. Two weeks later, the couple returned to the Bordeaux Consulate asking Sousa Mendes to issue them false papers. Sousa Mendes agreed to their request, and on 30 May 1940, he issued a Portuguese passport listing Paul Miny as Maria's brother, therefore as having Portuguese citizenship. This time Sousa Mendes risked himself a great deal more than he had before; disobeying Circular 14 was one thing, but issuing a passport with a false identity, for someone of military age was a crime. Sousa Mendes later provided the following explanation: "This couple asked me for a Portuguese passport, where they would figure as brother and sister, for fear that the husband, who was still of military age, would be detained on passing the French border, and incorporated in the Luxembourg army then being organized in France." Portuguese authorities were remarkably lax when dealing with this transgression. Paul Miny was a deserter (not a Jew) and Sousa Mendes' offence carried out a penalty of two year in prison and expulsion from public service.

There were other cases from May 1940 where Sousa Mendes disobeyed Circular 14. Examples include issuing visas to the Ertag, Flaksbaum and Landesman families, all granted on 29 May, despite having been rejected in a telegram from the Portuguese dictator Salazar to Sousa Mendes. Another example is the writer Gisèle Quittner, rejected by Salazar but rescued by Sousa Mendes, to whom she expressed her gratitude: "You are Portugal's best propaganda and an honor to your country. All those who know you praise your courage...."

Encounter with Rabbi Chaim Tzvi Kruger

As the German army approached Paris, the largest single movement of refugees in Europe since the Early Middle Ages began. An estimated six to ten million people took to the roads and railways to escape the German invasion.Lansing Warren, "Refugee Millions Suffer in France; Roads From Paris to Bordeaux Jammed With Wanderers Pitifully in Need", ''The New York Times'', 19 June 1940. Bordeaux and other southern French cities were overrun by desperate refugees. One of these was a Chassidic Rabbi, Chaim Kruger, originally from Poland but more recently from Brussels, escaping with his wife and five children. Kruger and Sousa Mendes met by chance in Bordeaux, and quickly became friends. Sousa Mendes offered a visa to the Kruger family in defiance of Circular 14. In response, Kruger took a moral stand and refused to accept the visa unless all of his "brothers and sisters" (the mass of Jewish refugees stranded on the streets of Bordeaux) received visas too. Kruger's response plunged Sousa Mendes into "a moral crisis of incalculable proportions."

At the same time, Sousa Mendes was also living out a personal drama. Andrée Cibial, Sousa Mendes’ lover, pregnant with his child, showed up at the consulate and provoked a scandal in front of Sousa Mendes' family, getting herself imprisoned for the incident. By this time, Sousa Mendes had a nervous breakdown and secluded himself in prayer, questioning whether or not he should issue as many visas as he could, saving lives at the expense of his own career. "Here the situation is horrible and I am in bed because of a strong nervous breakdown," he wrote to his son-in-law on 13 June 1940.

Act of conscience

On 12 June, despite the guarantees given by Franco, personally, to the Portuguese Ambassador Teotónio Pereira, that even if Italy entered the war, Spain would remain neutral, Spain took on the status of a non-belligerent power and invaded Tangiers, further endangering Portuguese neutrality. With German tanks approaching the Pyrenees and with anti-British demonstrations in Spain, demanding the return of Gibraltar, there was every prospect that Portugal and Spain would become embroiled in the hostilities.

On June 12 Salazar issued instructions to the Portuguese consulates in France to provide the Infanta Marie Anne of Portugal, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg and Infanta Maria Antónia of Portugal Duchess of Parma with Portuguese Passports. With these Portuguese Passports the entire entourage of the royal families could get visas without creating problems to the neutrality of the Portuguese Government. This way Zita of Bourbon-Parma and her son Otto von Habsburg got their visas because they were descendants of Portuguese citizens. Following the German annexation of Austria, Otto was sentenced to death by the Nazi regime.

On June 13, Salazar had to act fast again, this time to support the Belgium Royal family. Salazar sent instructions to the Portuguese Consulate in Bayonne saying the "Portuguese territory is completely open" to the Belgium Royal Family and its entourage.

On 16 June, despite his seclusion, Sousa Mendes issued 40 visas, including those for the Rothschild family, and he was paid his customary personal compensation fee for issuing visas on a Sunday.

On 17 June, Pétain announced in a broadcast to the French people that "it is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must stop fighting," and he calls on the Germans for an armistice that will end the fighting. On that same day, Sousa Mendes emerged from his seclusion, impelled by "a divine power," with his decision made. According to his son Pedro Nuno,

His daughter Isabel and her husband Jules strongly opposed his decision, and tried to dissuade him from what they considered to be a fatal mistake. But Sousa Mendes did not listen to them and instead began to work intensively to grant the visas. "I would rather stand with God and against man than with man and against God," he reportedly explained. He set up an assembly line process, aided by his wife, sons Pedro Nuno and José Antonio, his secretary José Seabra, Rabbi Kruger, and a few other refugees.

According to the Bordeaux Register of Visas on the 17th were issued 247 Visas; on the 18th, 216; between the 19th and the 22nd, an average of 350 were written into the Register of Visas.

The testimony from American writer Eugene Bagger is quite unfavourable regarding the efficiency of the "assembly line" set up by Sousa Mendes. Bagger says that on 18 June, he queued for a couple of hours at the Portuguese Consulate, hoping to get a visa. Bagger says that the pushing and elbowing drove him to despair and he gave up after a few hours. The next morning he joined again a mob of four hundred in front of the Portuguese Consulate. He waited in line from 09:00 till 11:00, again to no avail and he finally quit. He then decided to have a drink at the Hotel Splendid, where he found Sousa Mendes having an aperitif with a friend. Sousa Mendes told Bagger that he was tired from overworking the previous day, from the crowds and from the heat. Then, at Bagger's request, Sousa Mendes signed Bagger's passport and told him to go back to the consulate to have it stamped. To Bagger's surprise, he was then helped by M. Skalski, the Polish consul at Arcachon. At the consulate, M. Skalski was able to cut through the crowds and get Bagger's passports duly stamped.

On 20 June, the British Embassy in Lisbon sent a letter to the Portuguese Foreign Office accusing Sousa Mendes of "deferring until after office hours all applications for visas" as well as "charging them at a special rate" and requiring at least one refugee "to contribute to a Portuguese charitable fund before the visa was granted." This complaint from the British Embassy and the timing of Sousa Mendes' unilateral decision could not have been worse for Salazar and his carefully planned attempt to preserve Portuguese neutrality. Salazar had instructed consulates in Spain and those in the south of France ― Bordeaux, Bayonne, Perpignan, Marseilles, Nice ― to issue transit visas to British citizens.

Bordeaux was bombed by the Wehrmacht on the night of 19–20 June 1940. In the morning, the demand for Portuguese visas intensified, not only in Bordeaux but also in nearby Bayonne, near the Spanish border. Sousa Mendes rushed to the Portuguese Consulate in Bayonne, which was under his jurisdiction, to relieve the Vice-Consul Faria Machado, who was refusing to grant visas to the crush of refugees. However, Eugene Bagger says that, at Bayonne, he saw Sousa Mendes rushing out of the Portuguese Consulate, pursued by a mob, and that Sousa Mendes, holding his head between his hands, was crying "Go away! No more visas!", then jumped into a car and shot down the hill pursued by curses from the mass of visa seekers.

In issuing visas at the Bayonne consulate, Sousa Mendes was aided by the Bayonne consular secretary, Manuel de Vieira Braga. Faria Machado, a Salazar loyalist in charge of the Bayonne consulate, reported this behaviour to Portugal's ambassador to Spain, Pedro Teotónio Pereira. Teotónio Pereria, a loyalist to the historic Anglo-Portuguese alliance, promptly set out for the French-Spanish border to put a stop to this activity. After observing Sousa Mendes' action, Teotónio Pereira sent a telegram to the Lisbon authorities in which he described Sousa Mendes as being "out of his mind" and also said that Sousa Mendes' "disorientation has made a great impression on the Spanish side with a political campaign against Portugal being created immediately accusing our country of giving shelter to the scum of the democratic regimes and defeated elements fleeing before the German victory." He declared Sousa Mendes to be mentally incompetent and, acting on Salazar's authority, he invalidated all further visas. Teotónio Pereira's role in drawing Spain with Portugal into a truly neutral peninsular bloc in line with the allies' strategy was praised both by the British and the American ambassadors.

Sousa Mendes continued on to Hendaye

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