Sampaio Garrido: the Portuguese envoy who sheltered Jews in Budapest

The men came to the country house at five in the morning on 28 April 1944. The house stood in Galgagyörk, a village about 50 kilometres from Budapest, and Portugal's minister to Hungary, Carlos de Sampaio Garrido, had rented it for his legation a few weeks earlier to get away from the air raids on the capital. The intruders took his guests prisoner and, when the guests asked to go back to the legation, took them to the central police station in Budapest instead.1 source1 source

Garrido was not sure who they were. In his cipher telegram to Lisbon he called them “Gestapo agents or Hungarian police”, and his successor later wrote of German and Hungarian police “in ridiculous disguise”. Yad Vashem's account speaks of the Hungarian police. Garrido sent the Hungarian prime minister a protest the same day, calling the raid a “revolting attempt” on the principle that a legation is foreign territory.3 sources3 sources

Among the prisoners was his Jewish secretary, Magda Gabor, a sister of the future Hollywood stars Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor. Several of her relatives were staying in the house too. Annette Tillemann, a Budapest girl who later married the American congressman Tom Lantos, is quoted on a Yad Vashem panel describing the moment the police tried to take Magda away.3 sources3 sources

Garrido turned 61 that month. Within six weeks he had left Hungary for good. The work he started was carried on by his deputy, Alberto Teixeira Branquinho, and by the end of October 1944 the Portuguese legation had papers out that it reckoned covered about a thousand people.1 source1 source

Carlos de Almeida Afonseca de Sampaio Garrido was born on 5 April 1883. He studied economics and finance and joined the Foreign Ministry as a legation aide on 24 December 1901, when he was 18. For most of the next thirty years he was a consul, and most of that time he spent in Brazil: Rio Grande do Sul from 1910, then Porto Alegre, Bahia and São Paulo, and from 1921 the consulate general in Rio de Janeiro.2 sources2 sources

In December 1930 he became consul general in Paris. He was promoted to minister plenipotentiary in 1933, posted to Buenos Aires in 1935 and named envoy to Budapest on 27 July 1939, five weeks before the war began. He reached Hungary in October 1939.2 sources2 sources

Until 1944 Hungary was Germany’s ally. The regent, Miklós Horthy, ran a right-wing, antisemitic government that joined the Axis in November 1940 and passed three major anti-Jewish laws between 1938 and 1941. Tens of thousands of Jewish men died in forced labour units. Yet most of the country's Jews were still alive in early 1944: between 760,000 and 780,000 people, the largest Jewish population left in Europe.1 source1 source

On 19 March 1944 German troops crossed the border, and Horthy was made to appoint a pro-German prime minister, Döme Sztójay. Adolf Eichmann and his deportation staff came with them. Garrido's telegram of the next day was brief: the Germans had met no resistance on the way to Budapest. Four days later he reported that the Gestapo were arresting “people of repute and even Members Parliament”. Lisbon told him to act with “the maximum prudence and reserve” towards the new government.2 sources2 sources

Then came the yellow star, compulsory from 5 April, and ghettos in provincial towns. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944 about 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary on 147 trains, about 420,000 of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where some 330,000 were gassed on arrival. Esther Mucznik's article for Yad Vashem rounds the deportations to nearly 450,000. By July the provinces had been emptied of Jews, and the roughly 200,000 in Budapest were almost all that remained.4 sources4 sources

Garrido's recall came first, and for other reasons. After the Allies told Lisbon that the Sztójay government was a puppet, on 28 March the ministry ordered its minister home “without delay”. He was to be replaced by a chargé d'affaires, “so as not to give the idea that it was breaking diplomatic ties but to mark the decreased independence of the Hungarian State”. Garrido stayed on until a secretary arrived, so that Hungarians would not read his departure as a break.1 source1 source

Meanwhile the legation moved. Allied bombers had begun to hit Budapest, and several neutral missions left for the suburbs; Yad Vashem's account says the Hungarian government ordered them to. On 11 April Garrido told Lisbon about the house at Galgagyörk, and added that hundreds of people from countries with no legation in Budapest were coming to the Portuguese consulate every day to ask for protection. He would keep refusing them, he wrote, “unless otherwise instructed”.3 sources3 sources

In the house itself he was less careful. He took in about a dozen Hungarians, most of them Jews, among them Magda Gabor and members of her family, and he did not tell Lisbon. Yad Vashem's account puts the house 60 kilometres from Budapest; his own telegram of 11 April says 50.3 sources3 sources

After the raid he had to explain. On 10 May he described the twelve people lodged at Galgagyörk as “all Catholic although some of Jewish extraction”, people who had fled the bombing and political persecution. They included a member of the Hungarian upper house, a Hungarian minister plenipotentiary, a nephew of Hungary's minister in Japan and a sister-in-law of a London Rothschild. Other neutral legations, he added, were doing the same.1 source1 source

Lisbon was surprised but not angry. The ministry regretted the “disturbances” and noted that Garrido had not said who his guests were. On 11 May it told him that if he had given asylum for “humanitarian reasons which the Portuguese Government has no wish to ignore”, he should have asked for instructions first. It promised to keep protecting the real political refugees until it could decide. The Hungarian press attacked Garrido by name, and Hungary declared him persona non grata.3 sources3 sources

Garrido left Budapest on 5 June 1944, the day before the Normandy landings, heading for Portugal by way of Switzerland. Mucznik writes that he took his Jewish secretary with him. He stopped in Bern, where at the end of June he was still waiting for German permission to cross France.2 sources2 sources

He did not let the refugees go. Through the Portuguese minister in Bern he asked Lisbon for consular passports for the people still sheltered by the legation, and he kept sending advice and lists of names to Budapest. On 27 June he warned the ministry's secretary general that the Hungarians' good will would not be enough without pressure from Lisbon on Berlin.2 sources2 sources

Lisbon wanted him to stop. On 7 July the secretary general told him that his direct instructions to Budapest would only “disturb” the chargé d'affaires, “who has shown zeal”. On 25 July came a sharper message: Garrido had given protection to many refugees without consulting anyone, and Lisbon had learned what had really happened only after the raid. It was “inconvenient and impossible” for the legation in Budapest to take orders from Bern. Even so, on 12 July the ministry granted asylum to a Madame Kende on Garrido's recommendation.1 source1 source

Alberto Carlos de Liz Teixeira Branquinho was born in Viseu on 27 January 1902 and graduated in 1928 from the Instituto Superior de Comércio in Lisbon. He had served in Rio de Janeiro, Peking and Shanghai. His service record posts him to the Budapest legation on 25 April 1944, but his own report places his arrival after the raid, and Mucznik dates it to June. He ran the legation as interim chargé d'affaires from 5 June to 29 October.3 sources3 sources

His first months were spent defending what Garrido had left: the refugees in the legation house and the legation's Jewish staff, who, he wrote, were the only people in Hungary who knew any Portuguese. On 7 July Horthy stopped the deportations. In August, with the Germans pressing for deportations from Budapest, Branquinho looked to the Swedish minister, who had already issued about 700 Swedish passports that named no nationality and was putting their holders in houses under Swedish protection.2 sources2 sources

Lisbon agreed the same day that “our effort must be to save as many as possible of those who took refuge with us”, and on 15 August it authorised provisional Portuguese passports on humanitarian grounds. It also set limits. It would not match the numbers of the other neutrals, it said, since “only a very small number may legitimately claim direct links Portugal and Brazil”. By 14 August the Swedes had gone from 700 protected people to 3,000, and the Swiss were preparing the departure of about 30,000 people for Palestine and other countries.1 source1 source

The scheme ran through the Portuguese consulate. Applications went to a committee of the vice-consul, Jules Gulden, a lawyer from the Brazilian legation and a member named by the Hungarian Jewish committee which checked each file. Applicants had to show some “moral, intellectual or commercial” tie with Portugal or Brazil, whose interests Portugal looked after in Hungary. By 26 August he had issued 200 passports and asked for 400 more, for about 400 families or 1,200 people bound for Palestine.1 source1 source

On 15 October 1944 Horthy announced that he would seek an armistice with the Soviet Union. The Germans detained him and installed Ferenc Szálasi of the fascist Arrow Cross party, whose militias began a reign of terror in Budapest. Szálasi declared on the radio that foreign protection of Jews would not be tolerated and that passports already granted would not be respected. On 25 October Branquinho reported forced marches of Jews towards Vienna; some of the marchers held Portuguese passports.2 sources2 sources

Lisbon would not recognise the new government. On 22 October it recalled Branquinho, while approving his request to set up a Portuguese Red Cross section at the legation to look after the protected people once he had gone. Two days later the Hungarian foreign minister told him that any concessions depended on recognition. On 27 October the Hungarian Foreign Ministry issued an aide-mémoire releasing the 698 Jews who held provisional Portuguese passports.1 source1 source

Branquinho drove out of Budapest on 29 October in two legation cars, heading for Bregenz near the Swiss border. With him were his wife, a Mr and Mrs Gabor, a Mrs Tillmann and her daughter Agnes, and two others. Hillary Clinton said in 2012 that Annette Tillemann had escaped Hungary on a Portuguese protective passport with a group of the legation's diplomats, and that on Christmas Day 1944, aged 13, she crossed alone into Switzerland.2 sources2 sources

The figure of “about 1,000” comes from Branquinho himself. In his report Mission to Budapest he listed the people the Hungarian government and the German minister had undertaken to respect on the day he left, and handed a complete list to the Hungarians. He concluded that about a thousand would owe their lives to Portugal. The Foreign Ministry's own catalogue says Portuguese action in Hungary “officially” helped save about 1,000 people.1 source1 source

Other documents give other numbers, and they do not all count the same thing. The Hungarian aide-mémoire counts 698 passport holders. Branquinho's note of April 1945 says the consulate granted about 800 provisional passports. Mucznik's article for Yad Vashem gives about 1,000 protective documents, 700 of them provisional passports. The historian Yehuda Bauer, quoted in the catalogue, credited the vice-consul Jules Gulden with 1,200 protection papers.2 sources2 sources

A promise to respect papers was not the same as survival. In Lisbon the ministry admitted on 4 November that it had no exact count of the passport holders but knew that some were already on lists for deportation “under particularly cruel conditions”. Gulden left Budapest in December under threats, and two legation employees, Peter Pajzs and Thomas Herzog, had vanished; he suspected they had been executed by Arrow Cross extremists.1 source1 source

On 1 January 1945, according to a letter from the man Gulden left in charge, Count François Pongrácz, the SS attacked the legation and carried off the Jewish refugees inside. Soviet troops reached Budapest's two ghettos on 16 to 18 January and freed about 119,000 Jews in the city. How many of Portugal's protected people were among them is not known. Swedish and Swiss efforts were on a much larger scale, and the USHMM credits the neutral diplomats together with saving tens of thousands.3 sources3 sources

Both careers went on. Garrido was named envoy to Stockholm in December 1945. Branquinho served in Washington, Caracas, Jakarta and Ankara, ended his career as ambassador in The Hague and retired at the end of 1966.1 source1 source

The catalogue's editor, Manuela Franco, wrote that by the time Germany occupied Hungary it was already clear that Germany would lose the war, and that for Lisbon “it was a question of being on the winning side”. Mucznik quotes the historian Avraham Milgram: Salazar's aim was less to help the Jews than to win political points for the future. The two diplomats, she argued, used that calculation to save lives.2 sources2 sources

The story surfaced slowly. In 1994 Público ran reports headlined “Two Portuguese saved a thousand Jews” (translated from Portuguese). When the prime minister António Guterres visited Budapest in 1998, plaques to the two diplomats were put up where the legation had stood. In 2000 the Foreign Ministry opened its documents in the exhibition Spared Lives, which was made to tour Portuguese consulates in the United States; the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation honoured both men in 2006, and the Hungarian Jewish Museum showed the telegrams in 2009.4 sources4 sources

On 2 February 2010 Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance centre, recognised Sampaio Garrido as Righteous Among the Nations, a title for non-Jews who risked themselves to save Jews. The medal was awarded posthumously, to be handed to his family by the Israeli ambassador in Lisbon. Mucznik argued that Branquinho deserved it too; he has not received it. Yad Vashem's statistics list three Righteous under Portugal as of 1 January 2024, out of 28,707 worldwide. Portuguese sources, counting by nationality, name four, adding the priest Joaquim Carreira and the emigrant worker José Brito Mendes to Sousa Mendes and Garrido.4 sources4 sources

Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who disobeyed orders in Bordeaux in 1940, is still the Portuguese rescuer everyone knows. In 2021 Portugal's foreign minister told a ceremony for “rescuer diplomats” that the action of Sampaio Garrido and Teixeira Branquinho in Budapest was by then well documented. In 2018 the Portuguese ambassador laid a wreath at the old legation site.2 sources2 sources