Aristides de Sousa Mendes: the consul who defied Salazar dies poor, 1954

For three days in June 1940, his family later said, the consul did not leave his bedroom. The Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux was at No. 14 Quai Louis XVIII, on the river front, and Aristides de Sousa Mendes lived in the same building with his wife, Angelina, and several of their children. Outside, the streets were full of people who had fled the German armies and wanted one thing from him: a stamp in their passports that would let them cross Spain to Lisbon.2 sources2 sources

His son Pedro Nuno remembered how it ended, on the morning of 17 June. His father got up calmer and full of energy, washed, shaved and dressed, opened the door of the chancery and said in a loud voice that from then on he would give visas to everyone who asked, whatever their nationality, race or religion.1 source1 source

For about a week he and his staff signed visas for anyone who came, first in Bordeaux and then at the border. It cost him his career. Fourteen years later, on 3 April 1954, he died in Lisbon in the hospital of the Franciscan Third Order, a charity hospital for the poor, partly paralysed and with most of his children abroad.3 sources3 sources

Sousa Mendes was an unlikely rebel. He was born on 19 July 1885 in Cabanas, now Cabanas de Viriato, a village near Viseu in the Beira Alta, a few hours after his twin brother César. The family was Catholic and aristocratic, and their father was an appeal court judge in Coimbra. Both twins studied law at the University of Coimbra, graduated in 1907 and entered the foreign service in 1910, in the last months of the monarchy.2 sources2 sources

His career took him around the world. He was consul in Demerara in British Guiana, Zanzibar, Curitiba, San Francisco, São Luís do Maranhão and Porto Alegre, then Vigo from 1927 and Antwerp from 1929 to 1938. He had fifteen children, fourteen of them with Angelina, and the family travelled with him from post to post. The money never stretched far enough, and he often wrote to Lisbon asking for allowances.3 sources3 sources

He was a conservative and a devout Catholic. In 1927 he told a Spanish newspaper that the military coup of 1926 had answered a national aspiration, and in Vigo he watched Portuguese republicans plotting in Galicia. His brother César was foreign minister in 1932. Two disciplinary cases in Belgium were dropped, and in 1938 the ministry sent him to Bordeaux.1 source1 source

Portugal wanted refugees to pass through, not stay. From 1936 Russians, stateless people and holders of Nansen passports, the travel papers the League of Nations issued to refugees, could no longer get residence permits. In October 1938, after Germany annexed Austria, a ministry directive said Jewish emigrants could enter only as tourists, and only for 30 days.1 source1 source

Two months after the war began, the ministry sent its posts Circular 14, dated 11 November 1939. Its stated aim was to prevent abuses that the PVDE judged inconvenient or dangerous. Career consuls could no longer give a visa without the ministry's prior authorisation to the groups it listed.2 sources2 sources

Sousa Mendes broke the rule within days. On 21 November 1939 he stamped the passport of Arnold Wiznitzer, an Austrian Jew, and asked Lisbon for permission afterwards, on 27 November and 6 December. The family reached Portugal and sailed for Brazil. In March 1940 the police turned back at Lisbon a Spanish Republican doctor, Eduardo Neira Laporte, holding a visa from Bordeaux. In April the ministry warned the consul that any new offence would be treated as disobedience.1 source1 source

As Germany overran the Low Countries in May 1940, Lisbon tightened again. Circular 17 of 17 May said no visa at all could be given without prior authorisation. A telegram to Bordeaux on 22 May, signed by the minister, warned that requests would be granted only in exceptional cases and that quick decisions should not be expected.2 sources2 sources

In June the French government itself retreated to Bordeaux, followed by millions of people on the roads. Accounts of the city's swollen population vary: from about 300,000 to more than 700,000 in Rui Afonso's biography, and to some two million in Maria Raquel Andrade's. Many of those queueing at the consulates were Jews; others were Belgians, Dutch, French, Poles and Czechs.4 sources4 sources

On 13 June Sousa Mendes asked Lisbon for a visa for Chaim Kruger, a Polish rabbi whom he had taken into his home with the rabbi's wife and children, and was refused. Kruger, the family remembered, told him that help for himself alone was not enough while all his brethren were in danger. The next day the Germans entered Paris, and Circular 23 ordered consuls to send visa requests straight to the PVDE.3 sources3 sources

On 16 June Francisco de Calheiros e Menezes, Portugal's minister to Belgium, called on his way home and found the consul in his room, visibly tired and shaken. The consulate still seemed to work normally. Accounts differ. His son dated the days in bed from 14 June. The historian Cláudia Ninhos dates the decision to disobey to after Calheiros's visit, while Manuela Franco reads the register's drop to 40 visas on the 16th as the day he called in sick and stopped waiting for Lisbon.3 sources3 sources

From the 17th the work went on from morning until the small hours. The chancery secretary, José de Seabra, one of the consul's sons and a nephew helped, and many surviving visas carry Seabra's signature. Rabbi Kruger collected passports in batches. In the last days names were no longer written down, and in the end nothing was recorded.4 sources4 sources

Bayonne, more than 200 kilometres away by road, had its own crowd. Sousa Mendes drove there on 18 or 19 June. He later said the consul, Faria Machado, had been phoning for instructions for days, with about 5,000 people waiting in the street. He proposed that Machado visa every passport without charging fees or registering it. Calheiros, who was there, testified that Sousa Mendes claimed Lisbon's authority and that Machado resisted before giving way. Sousa Mendes also let the honorary vice-consul in Toulouse give transit visas to anyone with a visa for the Americas, and he signed more himself at Hendaye, on the border.2 sources2 sources

Lisbon caught up quickly. On 20 June the British embassy complained that the Bordeaux consulate was charging extra for visas issued after hours. On the 21st Faria Machado telegraphed from Bayonne, reporting Sousa Mendes's orders and asking for instructions. On the 22nd the ministry stripped Sousa Mendes of the power to issue visas. Armando Lopo Simeão, a ministry official, was sent to Bayonne, and the ambassador in Madrid, Pedro Teotónio Pereira, reached the border on the night of the 22nd.2 sources2 sources

On Sunday 23 June the two men met the consul by chance at Hendaye. Teotónio Pereira later described a disturbed man who had lost the use of reason; Simeão called the visas an act of madness and the refugees an ignoble mass, largely undesirable from a social point of view. Teotónio Pereira told the Spanish authorities that Lisbon had annulled the visas Sousa Mendes had signed, and on 24 June the ministry ordered him home. He stayed until 9 July and, witnesses said, helped more refugees across the border.3 sources3 sources

The figure most often repeated is that Sousa Mendes saved 30,000 people, 10,000 of them Jews. The historian Avraham Milgram traced its spread to an article by Harry Ezratty in the magazine Jewish Life in 1964. Olivia Mattis, president of the Sousa Mendes Foundation, writes that the figure is impossible to confirm but can be traced back to the 1940s, and argues that it is of the right order of magnitude.2 sources2 sources

The firmest number comes from the Bordeaux register of visas. A vice-consul found it at the consulate in 1987; it is now in the Foreign Ministry's archive and, since 2017, on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. Milgram counted 2,862 visas in it between the start of 1940 and 22 June, most of them in June. That count misses whatever was signed in Bayonne, Hendaye and Toulouse. One visa could also cover a whole family, because children travelled on a parent's passport.3 sources3 sources

What the evidence supports is thousands of visas in a few days, many of them for people the rules shut out. How many people crossed on them is still argued over. The refugees who reached Portugal were mostly let in: Spain would not take them back, and the PVDE chief, Agostinho Lourenço, testified that most of those he saw at Vilar Formoso held visas from Bordeaux. Others, still in France when Teotónio Pereira annulled the visas, were stranded.3 sources3 sources

On 30 June the ministry's director-general of economic and consular affairs, the Count of Tovar, listed the consul's offences and proposed a disciplinary process. Salazar ordered it in a note he signed on 4 July. The charges were four: disobedience, forgery of documents, abandoning his post and extortion.2 sources2 sources

His written defence, dated 10 August, did not use the chaos or his own exhaustion as an excuse. He answered each charge in turn. He said the chancery had worked from nine in the morning until the small hours without charging the after-hours fee, apart from one payment from Robert Rothschild, whose passport he stamped on a Sunday. Then he set out why he had done it.1 source1 source

He could not, he wrote, make distinctions between nationalities, because he obeyed reasons of humanity that distinguish neither race nor nationality. The investigating officer, Francisco de Paula Brito Júnior, proposed a suspension of 30 to 180 days and noted that the consul had acted under obvious nervous depression. Tovar wanted inactivity and demotion. On 29 October the ministry's disciplinary council proposed demoting him one grade.2 sources2 sources

The decision was Salazar's. On 30 October 1940 he sentenced Sousa Mendes to a year of inactivity on half pay, to be followed by compulsory retirement from the diplomatic service. The sentence was published in the official gazette days later. The file ended up in a sealed envelope in the ministry's archive, where it stayed until 1976.3 sources3 sources

Half pay for a year, then a small pension, could not keep a family of his size. In 1941 he was allowed to register as a lawyer, but he never practised. In May 1945 a brain haemorrhage left him paralysed on his right side. His retirement pension of 1,595.30 escudos was, he told the Bar Association, not enough to feed the people who depended on him.1 source1 source

The family took meals at the soup kitchen run in Lisbon by the Jewish community's refugee aid organisation, which was paid for by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. One by one his children left the country; the two sons born in California fought for the Allies. The family house in Cabanas, the Casa do Passal, had to be given up to pay debts.4 sources4 sources

He never stopped asking for his case to be reopened. He wrote to President Óscar Carmona, to Salazar and to the National Assembly. In a long letter of December 1945 he argued that the orders against Jews broke article 8 of the 1933 constitution, which guaranteed freedom of belief, and called the government's policy unconstitutional, unneutral and contrary to humanity. A British embassy note of October 1945 describing his poverty was marked at the ministry with one word in the margin: arquivar, “file it”.2 sources2 sources

Salazar, meanwhile, told the National Assembly on 18 May 1945 that anyone in Portugal's place would have taken in refugees, and added: “Pena foi não termos podido fazer mais” (“It was a pity we could not have done more”). The regime presented the welcome given to the refugees as its own work. A school textbook of 1960 still called Portugal an oasis of peace that had taken in 38,697 foreigners in 1940 alone.2 sources2 sources

Angelina died in 1948. In 1949 he married Andrée Cibial, the Frenchwoman with whom he had a daughter born in 1940, and asked to emigrate to California to join five of his children; he never went. He died on 3 April 1954. The Sousa Mendes Foundation says he was buried in a Franciscan habit because he had no suitable clothes of his own. His grave is in the family vault at Cabanas de Viriato.3 sources3 sources

Recognition came first from abroad. In 1966 Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, recognised him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, after a campaign by his children and Rabbi Kruger. His daughter Joana wrote to Salazar about it in February 1968 and to the ministry that August.3 sources3 sources

After the revolution of 25 April 1974 the case moved slowly. In May 1976 a diplomat, Nuno Bessa Lopes, opened the sealed envelope that held the disciplinary file and called it a case of high significance in Portuguese diplomatic history. The foreign minister, Melo Antunes, ordered the case treated urgently. A ministerial ruling of 19 January 1977 found the forced retirement illegal and reinstated him posthumously, but it was never published.4 sources4 sources

President Mário Soares made him an officer of the Order of Liberty posthumously, in 1986 according to the government and in 1987 according to Ninhos. On a bill brought by the opposition deputy Jaime Gama, the Assembleia da República voted unanimously in 1988 to reinstate Sousa Mendes in the diplomatic career with the rank of ambassador and to compensate his direct heirs. The Grand Cross of the Order of Christ followed in 1995 and the Grand Cross of the Order of Liberty in 2016.5 sources5 sources

In 2020 parliament approved a proposal by the independent deputy Joacine Katar Moreira to grant him the honours of the National Pantheon. Nobody voted against: in the final vote on 3 July every other party was in favour and André Ventura, Chega's only deputy, abstained. On 19 October 2021 President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and the speaker, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, unveiled a plaque in room 2 of the Pantheon, the former church of Santa Engrácia, giving his name, his dates, “Justo entre as Nações” (Righteous Among the Nations) and “diplomata”. No tomb was installed, and his body stayed at Cabanas de Viriato.4 sources4 sources

His story contradicts the regime's account of Portugal's wartime neutrality. For decades the official version was that the country had opened its arms to refugees; the files show a government that tried to keep most of them out, and a consul who let them in against orders. In December 2021 the Foreign Ministry put an olive tree and a plaque to its rescuing diplomats in the cloister of its headquarters, the Palácio das Necessidades.3 sources3 sources

Manuela Franco argued that the visas he signed opened the door to most of the roughly 40,000 refugees who passed through Portugal in 1940. Many sailed from Lisbon to the Americas. Their descendants are still being traced by the Sousa Mendes Foundation, which by 2015 had identified about 3,900 visa recipients by name.2 sources2 sources