Winter of 1941 - '42: Portugal, And A House Divided
"It is Portugal's honor to be the last bastion of Christian civilization on the European continent."
- Antonio Salazar, 1942
"Wir sind das Deutsche 'Iberia Korps,'
Der Führers verwegene Truppe!"
- Song of the 'Iberia Korps,' 1942 - '43
Excerpt from The Salazar Years, by Filip Ribeiro de Menses
…On the 23rd of January, Franco ‘invited’ Salazar to Spain to discuss the ‘developing situation’ and its ramifications for Iberia. In his first foray out of Portugal in many years, the two dictators met in Seville, in the company of both Mario de Figueiredo and Franco’s brother in law and foreign minister, Serrano Suñer. For almost four hours, Franco harangued Salazar on the inevitably of Axis victory, insisting that the Allies were spent and that even the entry of the Americans into the war could not save England and the Soviet Union. Figueiredo recalled that Serrano Suñer – who, slender, silver-tongued, and impeccably dressed in his dark suit, cut a rather more sinister figure than his dumpy brother-in-law – regularly interrupted to insist, over and over, that it was time for Portugal to repudiate her centuries old “English error” and turn back to Iberia. Figueiredo would later remark that it sometimes seemed “they were trying to convince themselves as much as us.”
As the ‘meeting’ continued, Franco came very near issuing outright threats when he warned that it would be “very dire” for Portugal to find herself in the cold after the victory, when the time came to consolidate the “New European Order.”
Salazar said very little, except to remind Franco that in the summer of 1940 he had pushed for a renewal of Spain and Portugal’s 1939 non-aggression and mutual assistance treaty, an offer which Franco, riding on the high of German victories in the west, had rebuffed. [1]
He left for Lisbon without having made any commitments, much to Franco’s chagrin. Moreover, as soon as he returned, Salazar summoned to his offices Captain Roque de Aguiar, director of Legionary intelligence, to discuss an immediate increase in the Legion’s manpower, to almost 40,000 men. An raft of orders to Captain Lourenço also saw the PVDE reoriented, from its traditional focus on leftist and liberal dissidents to extreme-rightists like the syndicalists of Rolão Preto, who was back in Portugal and was steadfastly advocating for a break with Britain and a new alliance with Spain. Finally, Salazar reconciled with the General Abílio Passos e Sousa. Flattering the general’s ego, Salazar frankly said that he had been wrong and Passos e Sousa had been right, and that it was time to discuss greatly enlarging Portugal’s little three-division army, just as Passos e Sousa had pushed for some years earlier. Though in his heart, Salazar still hoped at this stage that war could be averted, he was unmistakably preparing for it…
Excerpt from A World at Arms, by Gerhard Weinberg
…Almost from the moment of Spain’s entry into the war, the Iberian peninsula featured prominently in the thinking of British, and then American, war planners. Besides the fact that the country was, quite literally, the utmost western extremity of the European continent, Spain differed from the other Axis Powers in that it had just come through a devastating civil war, and huge swathes of the population could be assumed hostile to the ruling Franco clique. Moreover, the German-Spanish capture of Gibraltar had nearly locked the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean, and made supplying Malta and especially Montgomery’s troops battling Rommel in Africa, a thornier prospect. The Admiralty in particular was keen to recapture Gibraltar and reopen the path between the Pillars of Hercules. For all of these reasons, Spain was increasingly seen by the Allies as “the key to Axis Europe"...
Excerpt from Whitney H. Shepardson’s report to William Donovan on Spain, late 1942
The Spaniards can be thought of as roughly divided into the following subcategories:
In a very real sense, it can be said that Spain is not really an ‘enemy country’ in the sense that Germany or Japan is. It is better thought of as an occupied one, similar to Poland or France. A very large part of the population, likely an outright majority, is at least passively opposed to the Franco regime, and would be glad to see it overthrown. Tens of thousands of Spaniards are already thought to be active in the armed ‘partisan’ movement, and hundreds of thousands more are sympathetic to its aims. The cores of the resistance movement are in Catalonia and in particular Barcelona, in the mining country of the north, and in the desperately poor regions of western Andalusia and Estremadura. In these regions, over the past year, it is believed more than 500 regime, party, and military officials have been assassinated. Travel between large cities has become increasingly dangerous for columns of the Spanish Army or the Civil Guard, as partisan ambushes have become more common. Franco has been forced to significantly increase military presence in these regions, and to import experienced Nazi ‘partisan fighters’ to deal with these ‘disturbances.’ Coupled with military disasters in the east, it is believed the foundations of Franco’s state are quickly eroding. Spain’s armed forces can almost certainly not survive contact with the armies of any Allied power for more than a few days or weeks...
Excerpt from Vernichtungskrieg: The Eastern Front, 1941 - 1945, by Stephen G. Fritz
…Hitler was, again, troubled by Spain. By the start of 1942, the Führer was coming to deeply regret Franco’s entry into the war. Spain’s ‘contribution’ of an army corps to the eastern front was strongly outweighed by the dead weight of twenty-five million people on the brink of starvation, and a country increasingly ablaze with partisan activity, problems which could only be ameliorated by the attentions of an already significantly overstretched Germany.
But most of all, Hitler worried about Spain as a potential beachhead for an Allied invasion of the continent. With the Red Army’s failure to collapse, the threat of a two-front war loomed again, and he was willing to do whatever was necessary to avert that nightmare. Hitler’s first hope was to cajole Portugal into repudiating its English alliance and signing onto the Tripartite Pact. At his urging, in January of 1942, Franco made an attempt to ‘persuade’ Portugal’s dictator, Antonio de Oliveira de Salazar, into doing just that. This effort was totally unsuccessful. Besides Salazar’s personal distaste for German Nazism, he was also farsighted enough to realize that hitching himself to the Axis wagon at this stage would end in disaster.
That meant that the massive, Portugal-sized breach in the walls of fortress Europe could only be closed by force. In the spring of 1942, even as OKW laid the groundwork for the offensive towards the Caucasus which would culminate in the titanic struggle for Stalingrad, Hitler decided to peel away four Wehrmacht divisions, as well as the 1st SS Panzer ‘Leibstandarte.’ They were organized into a new ‘Iberia Korps,’ under Model, for immediate service in Spain...
Excerpt from ‘Everybody’s Favorite Dictator,’ article for The Nation by Jon Lee Anderson, 1995
I stand face to face with Salazar. He looks down on me from his granite pedestal before the São Bento Palace. His face is serene, sleek, handsome, his iron suit neatly pressed. His right hand is raised in a wave, perhaps a fatherly gesture, perhaps – if one squints – almost a fascist salute.
Next to me is Ana Carvalho. She is a schoolteacher, twenty-seven years old, short, bespectacled. Besides the two of us, the square is practically empty. “He arrested my grandfather,” Ana says. “Because he was a union organizer. They kept him in jail for two months and they beat him every night. He was almost blind in one eye when they finally let him go, and he never slept right for the rest of his life.” She shakes her head. “They say, ‘oh, well, he wasn’t like Franco, he wasn’t like Hitler.’ Maybe not, but that doesn’t make him a hero.”
Antonio Oliveira de Salazar ruled Portugal for only ten years. Perhaps eleven or twelve, depending on how exactly one reckons, for in characteristic fashion, there was never one great seizure of power, no Reichstag Fire or March on Rome. Salazar conquered Portugal by degrees.
But no matter how his reign is reckoned, it was a short one. And yet the shadow of that time looms large over Portugal even forty years later.
For decades after the end of the Second World War, criticism of Salazar was absolutely beyond the pale in the country’s political mainstream, even among the far-left groupings like the Communist Party. He soon came to occupy a position comparable to that of George Washington in the United States, a figure above politics. Up until the last decade, six-year-old children in Portugal’s schools were given a writing exercise which asked them to answer the question, “who was Salazar?” The ‘right’ answer was “he who saved our Fatherland.” Only this year a national poll saw him voted “greatest Portuguese of all time” with overwhelming margins.
The statue before the São Bento Palace is only one of many that dot the country, and there are even more streets, city squares, and parks that bear his name. He is routinely invoked in parliamentary debates, with the suggestion that he would strongly approve or disapprove of this or that proposal.
The myth of Salazar reaches even beyond the borders of Portugal. A British secondary school history textbook printed in 1975 describes him as a “national leader” whose “humanitarian instincts kept him from being seduced by Hitlerism, as was Franco.”
In the United States, he is best known through Franklin J. Schaffner’s Salazar (1979), which netted actor Roy Scheider an Oscar for his thoroughly sympathetic portrayal of the dictator.
With the exception of some royalty, Salazar is the only European head of state to be honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem.
But in recent years, some Portuguese, like Ana, are seeking a reappraisal. It is certainly true that Salazar was not in the same moral universe as butchers of millions like Stalin or Hitler. He is not even comparable to his neighbor Franco, who massacred hundreds of thousands of Spaniards. Salazar’s leadership of Portugal during the war years was undeniably capable and courageous, and it is perhaps true that the Allied victory might have been significantly delayed had it been otherwise. His decision to remain in Lisbon while German bombs fell and Spanish divisions advanced on the capital perhaps outshines Churchill’s own defiance of the Blitz in London. It is to Salazar’s eternal credit that he sheltered Jewish refugees, while Franco delivered them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
But it remains a fact that Salazar was a dictator, and like all dictators, he ruled by corruption, terror, and intimidation. If his death toll does not compare to his contemporaries, it remains a fact that a number of his political opponents were murdered, dozens more died in his prisons, and thousands more were beaten, deported, denied employment and harassed endlessly by the secret police. For many, like Ana’s grandfather, Salazar’s regime was a nightmare that never seemed to end, even long after the dictator’s death. His policies of stark austerity kept millions of Portuguese into poverty in the name of ‘economic sobriety.’ While he is remembered for his courageous stand against Hitler and Franco, it is often forgotten that Franco’s own victory in the Spanish Civil War might not have been possible without the generous material and moral support of Salazar’s regime…
[1] OTL, this pact was indeed reaffirmed. ITTL, a more confident Franco repudiated it.
[2] organizing the population in this way might seem a little weird ("the military" is certainly not a category of the same type as "the middle class" or "the working class") but it's based on this OTL report on occupied Greece.
- Antonio Salazar, 1942
"Wir sind das Deutsche 'Iberia Korps,'
Der Führers verwegene Truppe!"
- Song of the 'Iberia Korps,' 1942 - '43
Excerpt from The Salazar Years, by Filip Ribeiro de Menses
…On the 23rd of January, Franco ‘invited’ Salazar to Spain to discuss the ‘developing situation’ and its ramifications for Iberia. In his first foray out of Portugal in many years, the two dictators met in Seville, in the company of both Mario de Figueiredo and Franco’s brother in law and foreign minister, Serrano Suñer. For almost four hours, Franco harangued Salazar on the inevitably of Axis victory, insisting that the Allies were spent and that even the entry of the Americans into the war could not save England and the Soviet Union. Figueiredo recalled that Serrano Suñer – who, slender, silver-tongued, and impeccably dressed in his dark suit, cut a rather more sinister figure than his dumpy brother-in-law – regularly interrupted to insist, over and over, that it was time for Portugal to repudiate her centuries old “English error” and turn back to Iberia. Figueiredo would later remark that it sometimes seemed “they were trying to convince themselves as much as us.”
As the ‘meeting’ continued, Franco came very near issuing outright threats when he warned that it would be “very dire” for Portugal to find herself in the cold after the victory, when the time came to consolidate the “New European Order.”
Salazar said very little, except to remind Franco that in the summer of 1940 he had pushed for a renewal of Spain and Portugal’s 1939 non-aggression and mutual assistance treaty, an offer which Franco, riding on the high of German victories in the west, had rebuffed. [1]
He left for Lisbon without having made any commitments, much to Franco’s chagrin. Moreover, as soon as he returned, Salazar summoned to his offices Captain Roque de Aguiar, director of Legionary intelligence, to discuss an immediate increase in the Legion’s manpower, to almost 40,000 men. An raft of orders to Captain Lourenço also saw the PVDE reoriented, from its traditional focus on leftist and liberal dissidents to extreme-rightists like the syndicalists of Rolão Preto, who was back in Portugal and was steadfastly advocating for a break with Britain and a new alliance with Spain. Finally, Salazar reconciled with the General Abílio Passos e Sousa. Flattering the general’s ego, Salazar frankly said that he had been wrong and Passos e Sousa had been right, and that it was time to discuss greatly enlarging Portugal’s little three-division army, just as Passos e Sousa had pushed for some years earlier. Though in his heart, Salazar still hoped at this stage that war could be averted, he was unmistakably preparing for it…
Excerpt from A World at Arms, by Gerhard Weinberg
…Almost from the moment of Spain’s entry into the war, the Iberian peninsula featured prominently in the thinking of British, and then American, war planners. Besides the fact that the country was, quite literally, the utmost western extremity of the European continent, Spain differed from the other Axis Powers in that it had just come through a devastating civil war, and huge swathes of the population could be assumed hostile to the ruling Franco clique. Moreover, the German-Spanish capture of Gibraltar had nearly locked the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean, and made supplying Malta and especially Montgomery’s troops battling Rommel in Africa, a thornier prospect. The Admiralty in particular was keen to recapture Gibraltar and reopen the path between the Pillars of Hercules. For all of these reasons, Spain was increasingly seen by the Allies as “the key to Axis Europe"...
Excerpt from Whitney H. Shepardson’s report to William Donovan on Spain, late 1942
The Spaniards can be thought of as roughly divided into the following subcategories:
- The workers.
- The farmers.
- The middle class.
- The church.
- The monarchists.
- The fascists.
- The military. [2]
- The Spanish working-class is broadly opposed to the Franco regime. During the civil war, it was the working-class that provided the base of support for the Loyalist government, and filled out its armies. Under the present government, and especially since the start of the war, this class has seen its already low standard of living collapse further. Starvation is now widespread in many regions of the country, especially in the south. Socialist and anarchist philosophies found fertile ground among the Spanish laborers under the old Republic, and Franco has not beaten these tendencies out of them. He greatly fears an uprising of this class. The primary task of the Spanish Army is in fact to keep the laboring classes pacified, especially now that this can no longer be done by assurances of bread and political stability. To the present day, armed resistance has sprung almost entirely from the workers.
- The small and big farmers of the country are mostly supportive of Franco, who they view as a bulwark against communism. They fervently opposed the Loyalist government in the civil war, and also tend towards a fanatic religiosity which breeds a distaste for democracy and modernism in general. Some of this class is dissatisfied by Franco’s increasing subservience to the fascist powers, and they have been hit by the unfolding economic catastrophe, but they are much more insulated than the workers, and by and large remain loyal to the regime. Franco knows the support of this class is crucial, and goes to great lengths to keep them happy, including the artificial inflation of grain prices, which tends to worsen famine conditions in the south.
- The middle class is largely quiescent. During the civil war, they were split between liberals in the French mold who supported the Republic and conservatives who sided with Franco. Whatever liberal or democratic sentiments remain among this class are dormant today. There is little to no sign of active resistance, though this may change as Franco’s fortunes worsen.
- The church has been critical to the functioning of Franco’s regime since the beginning, for they feared the intense ant-Church feeling of the Loyalist faction. The clergy is heavily integrated into the machinery of government, and most education is in their hands. They have a very medieval mindset, seeing little distinction between ‘Anglo-American’ democracy and Soviet communism. They have been fully behind Franco, but lately there has been dissatisfaction, as the bishops and priests are generally opposed to German-style Nazism, which they view as pagan. The Cardinal Gomá, Primate of Spain, is said to have come under police surveillance after several sermons critical of Hitler and Mussolini.
- The monarchists strongly supported Franco in the civil war, expecting that his victory would see the restoration of the king. When this did not happen, many began to sour. Many of the finest generals in Franco’s army are committed monarchists. Their support for the regime is conditional on the approval of the exiled heir to the throne. If it was to be withdrawn, they would no longer bear up Franco as they do. Franco has taken an increasingly hard line with many of them. Nevertheless, efforts to establish contacts with Juan Borbón have to date been mostly unsuccessful. In any case, a monarchist restoration is not likely to be well-received by the masses of the population.
- The fascists are evermore the core of the Franco state. Though earlier marginalized , more and more power has accrued to the ‘Phalanx’ as of late, as a show of deference to Germany and Italy. The fascist salute has become universal, and the ‘National Syndicates’ omnipotent. This is without a doubt the most dangerous sector of the population, not only for their fanaticism, but also for their imperial viewpoint, which sees them look across the Atlantic towards Latin America. Many cherish dreams of a rebirth of the old Spanish Empire, and their desire is to detach the Latin American republics from their traditional friendships with the United States. The fascists are diehards, and will probably keep faith in an Axis victory to the very end. More and more, they will be the only ones Franco can truly count on.
- The military is the lynchpin of the whole system. More than half the state budget goes to the Army. They serve not only for national defense, but also for police and increasingly even for the maintenance of services and infrastructure. Of course, Franco himself came out of the army. Without the army, the regime cannot survive. However, many officers have increasingly become disgruntled as a result of Franco’s concessions to the ‘Phalanx.’ Moreover, many consider the presence of German divisions on Spanish soil an insult to the honor of the army.
In a very real sense, it can be said that Spain is not really an ‘enemy country’ in the sense that Germany or Japan is. It is better thought of as an occupied one, similar to Poland or France. A very large part of the population, likely an outright majority, is at least passively opposed to the Franco regime, and would be glad to see it overthrown. Tens of thousands of Spaniards are already thought to be active in the armed ‘partisan’ movement, and hundreds of thousands more are sympathetic to its aims. The cores of the resistance movement are in Catalonia and in particular Barcelona, in the mining country of the north, and in the desperately poor regions of western Andalusia and Estremadura. In these regions, over the past year, it is believed more than 500 regime, party, and military officials have been assassinated. Travel between large cities has become increasingly dangerous for columns of the Spanish Army or the Civil Guard, as partisan ambushes have become more common. Franco has been forced to significantly increase military presence in these regions, and to import experienced Nazi ‘partisan fighters’ to deal with these ‘disturbances.’ Coupled with military disasters in the east, it is believed the foundations of Franco’s state are quickly eroding. Spain’s armed forces can almost certainly not survive contact with the armies of any Allied power for more than a few days or weeks...
Excerpt from Vernichtungskrieg: The Eastern Front, 1941 - 1945, by Stephen G. Fritz
…Hitler was, again, troubled by Spain. By the start of 1942, the Führer was coming to deeply regret Franco’s entry into the war. Spain’s ‘contribution’ of an army corps to the eastern front was strongly outweighed by the dead weight of twenty-five million people on the brink of starvation, and a country increasingly ablaze with partisan activity, problems which could only be ameliorated by the attentions of an already significantly overstretched Germany.
But most of all, Hitler worried about Spain as a potential beachhead for an Allied invasion of the continent. With the Red Army’s failure to collapse, the threat of a two-front war loomed again, and he was willing to do whatever was necessary to avert that nightmare. Hitler’s first hope was to cajole Portugal into repudiating its English alliance and signing onto the Tripartite Pact. At his urging, in January of 1942, Franco made an attempt to ‘persuade’ Portugal’s dictator, Antonio de Oliveira de Salazar, into doing just that. This effort was totally unsuccessful. Besides Salazar’s personal distaste for German Nazism, he was also farsighted enough to realize that hitching himself to the Axis wagon at this stage would end in disaster.
That meant that the massive, Portugal-sized breach in the walls of fortress Europe could only be closed by force. In the spring of 1942, even as OKW laid the groundwork for the offensive towards the Caucasus which would culminate in the titanic struggle for Stalingrad, Hitler decided to peel away four Wehrmacht divisions, as well as the 1st SS Panzer ‘Leibstandarte.’ They were organized into a new ‘Iberia Korps,’ under Model, for immediate service in Spain...
Excerpt from ‘Everybody’s Favorite Dictator,’ article for The Nation by Jon Lee Anderson, 1995
I stand face to face with Salazar. He looks down on me from his granite pedestal before the São Bento Palace. His face is serene, sleek, handsome, his iron suit neatly pressed. His right hand is raised in a wave, perhaps a fatherly gesture, perhaps – if one squints – almost a fascist salute.
Next to me is Ana Carvalho. She is a schoolteacher, twenty-seven years old, short, bespectacled. Besides the two of us, the square is practically empty. “He arrested my grandfather,” Ana says. “Because he was a union organizer. They kept him in jail for two months and they beat him every night. He was almost blind in one eye when they finally let him go, and he never slept right for the rest of his life.” She shakes her head. “They say, ‘oh, well, he wasn’t like Franco, he wasn’t like Hitler.’ Maybe not, but that doesn’t make him a hero.”
Antonio Oliveira de Salazar ruled Portugal for only ten years. Perhaps eleven or twelve, depending on how exactly one reckons, for in characteristic fashion, there was never one great seizure of power, no Reichstag Fire or March on Rome. Salazar conquered Portugal by degrees.
But no matter how his reign is reckoned, it was a short one. And yet the shadow of that time looms large over Portugal even forty years later.
For decades after the end of the Second World War, criticism of Salazar was absolutely beyond the pale in the country’s political mainstream, even among the far-left groupings like the Communist Party. He soon came to occupy a position comparable to that of George Washington in the United States, a figure above politics. Up until the last decade, six-year-old children in Portugal’s schools were given a writing exercise which asked them to answer the question, “who was Salazar?” The ‘right’ answer was “he who saved our Fatherland.” Only this year a national poll saw him voted “greatest Portuguese of all time” with overwhelming margins.
The statue before the São Bento Palace is only one of many that dot the country, and there are even more streets, city squares, and parks that bear his name. He is routinely invoked in parliamentary debates, with the suggestion that he would strongly approve or disapprove of this or that proposal.
The myth of Salazar reaches even beyond the borders of Portugal. A British secondary school history textbook printed in 1975 describes him as a “national leader” whose “humanitarian instincts kept him from being seduced by Hitlerism, as was Franco.”
In the United States, he is best known through Franklin J. Schaffner’s Salazar (1979), which netted actor Roy Scheider an Oscar for his thoroughly sympathetic portrayal of the dictator.
With the exception of some royalty, Salazar is the only European head of state to be honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem.
But in recent years, some Portuguese, like Ana, are seeking a reappraisal. It is certainly true that Salazar was not in the same moral universe as butchers of millions like Stalin or Hitler. He is not even comparable to his neighbor Franco, who massacred hundreds of thousands of Spaniards. Salazar’s leadership of Portugal during the war years was undeniably capable and courageous, and it is perhaps true that the Allied victory might have been significantly delayed had it been otherwise. His decision to remain in Lisbon while German bombs fell and Spanish divisions advanced on the capital perhaps outshines Churchill’s own defiance of the Blitz in London. It is to Salazar’s eternal credit that he sheltered Jewish refugees, while Franco delivered them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
But it remains a fact that Salazar was a dictator, and like all dictators, he ruled by corruption, terror, and intimidation. If his death toll does not compare to his contemporaries, it remains a fact that a number of his political opponents were murdered, dozens more died in his prisons, and thousands more were beaten, deported, denied employment and harassed endlessly by the secret police. For many, like Ana’s grandfather, Salazar’s regime was a nightmare that never seemed to end, even long after the dictator’s death. His policies of stark austerity kept millions of Portuguese into poverty in the name of ‘economic sobriety.’ While he is remembered for his courageous stand against Hitler and Franco, it is often forgotten that Franco’s own victory in the Spanish Civil War might not have been possible without the generous material and moral support of Salazar’s regime…
[1] OTL, this pact was indeed reaffirmed. ITTL, a more confident Franco repudiated it.
[2] organizing the population in this way might seem a little weird ("the military" is certainly not a category of the same type as "the middle class" or "the working class") but it's based on this OTL report on occupied Greece.
