Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945 - Hardcover

Lochery, Neill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586488791 ISBN 13: 9781586488796

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2011

Synopsis

Lisbon had a pivotal role in the history of World War II, though not a gun was fired there. The only European city in which both the Allies and the Axis power operated openly, it was temporary home to much of Europe's exiled royalty, over one million refugees seeking passage to the U.S., and a host of spies, secret police, captains of industry, bankers, prominent Jews, writers and artists, escaped POWs, and black marketeers. An operations officer writing in 1944 described the daily scene at Lisbon's airport as being like the movie Casablanca," times twenty. In this riveting narrative, renowned historian Neill Lochery draws on his relationships with high-level Portuguese contacts, access to records recently uncovered from Portuguese secret police and banking archives, and other unpublished documents to offer a revelatory portrait of the War's back stage. And he tells the story of how Portugal, a relatively poor European country trying frantically to remain neutral amidst extraordinary pressures, survived the war not only physically intact but significantly wealthier. The country's emergence as a prosperous European Union nation would be financed in part, it turns out, by a cache of Nazi gold.

About this title

Review:

An evocative chronicle of this little known corner of World War II... Distilling an enormous quantity of research, (Neill Lochery) has rendered a fascinating and readable account of this small country's role.
--Wall Street Journal Europe

"This was an ugly regime, and Lochery's Lisbon, under Salazar and his secret police, an ugly city... a city, in short, so morally bankrupt that even the Duke and Duchess of Windsor do not seem out of place. If Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund had had any sense they would have got
themselves on the first plane back to Casablanca." --The Spectator, 4th January

"The twists and turns of Salazar's tight-rope diplomacy form the central thread of Neill Lochery's impressive account of wartime Lisbon and its leader... The personalities, plots and counterplots within that tale are absorbing... The book's principal worth lies in its illumination of Salazar, who emerges from Lochery's pages as a fascinating, tireless and single-minded figure."
--Literary Review, February 2012

Book Description:

"Lochery tells the gripping story of the city known as 'Casablanca II'...engrossing and rewarding." - Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1586488791
• ISBN 13: 9781586488796
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384