Portugal, the Consuls, and the Jewish Refugees ... - Yad Vashem

From 1935, 25 the PVDE, dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, insisted thata clear and rigid policy should dictate the granting of visas, especially wherePoles, Russians, Jews, and individuals without a recognized nationality wereconcerned. 26 Later, this tendency would increase, due to the influence of pro-Germanic and antisemitic figures such as Captain Paulo Cumano, chief of theFiscalization Services and Borders of the International Section of the PVDE.Cumano, who had a degree in mining engineering from Berlin, was, it seems,the only Portuguese agent who was trained as a policeman in Germany. 27 Hisprivileged position in the Section of Portuguese International Police, togetherwith his antisemitism, “certified” in Germany, 28 were pernicious to German andAustrian Jews who tried to come to Portugal, and also created difficulties forseveral consuls who acted according to the law.In short, the Spanish issue in the context of the Iberian Peninsula, theintervention of the Axis countries in the civil war, the crisis of Jewish refugeesin the Reich, the hypersensitivity of Salazar and his regime to the entry offoreigners, and the policy of distancing Portugal from the European crisis wereall factors in determining Portugal’s response to the Jewish question.The first signs of sensitivity toward the Jews were not late in coming. In thesecond half of 1938, consuls in London, Amsterdam, Marseilles, Budapest,and Berlin continuously reported on the strategy being used to discourageJews from entering Portugal. The Portuguese International Police circulatedinfiltrating itself into innumerable areas of national life, trying to detectpotential enemies of the regime, especially communists and liberals. TomGalagher, “Controlled Repression in Salazar’s Portugal,” Journal ofContemporary History, vol. 14 (1979), pp. 385-402. According to DouglasL.Wheeler, the PVDE and, after 1945, the PIDE was a more defensive thanaggressive instrument; he points out that the neutralization or destruction ofthe policy of the opposition was only one among several police functionswhich it set out to fulfill. Douglas L.Wheeler, “In the Service of Order: ThePortuguese Political Police and the British, German and Spanish Intelligence,1932-1945,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 18 (1983), p. 2.25Mühlen, Fluchtweg Spanien-Portugal, p. 126.26Maria da Conceição Ribeiro, A Polícia Política no Estado Novo 1936-1945(Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1995), pp. 94-95.27Wheeler, “In the Service of Order,” p. 11.28Maria da Conceição Ribeiro quotes British sources in which Paulo Cumanois described as a Germanophile favoring Nazi racial ideas. See Ribeiro, APolícia Política, p. 119.__________________________________________________________________________8/31Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies