Portugal honors diplomat who saved thousands from Nazis

Portugal paid tribute on Tuesday to former diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who defied the Salazar dictatorship to issue visas to tens of thousands of Jews and other refugees during World War II.

To honor him, a small plaque was placed on the walls of the National Pantheon in Lisbon, which hosts the tombs of prominent Portuguese celebrities.

Leading Portuguese politicians and public figures attended the formal televised ceremony as the tomb was placed alongside other celebrity figures from Portuguese history at the landmark Lisbon building.

The speaker of the Portuguese Parliament, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, said that Sousa Mendes' actions offered prestige to Portugal.

"People who at the decisive moment put their and their family's safety at risk for the greater good are rare. Sousa Mendes was one of those people," Ferro Rodrigues said in a speech.

Visas allowed escape through Portugal

One of Portugal's most famous 20th-century diplomats, Sousa Mendes defied his superiors to hand visas to many people who feared being hunted by the Nazis, when working as consul in Bordeaux, France.

The visas allowed people fleeing the Holocaust to escape through Portugal by air and sea to the United States and other countries.

In this way, he is credited with saving 30,000 people, including 10,000 Jews. As a result of his actions, he was tried and stripped of his diplomatic title, and died poor in a Lisbon hospital aged 69 in 1954.

Sousa Mendes has often been compared with Oskar Schindler, who was credited with saving more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Sousa Mendes was also named "Righteous Among the Nations by the Shoah Memorial in Jerusalem in 1966.

In 1986, Portugal posthumously awarded him the Cross of Merit and reinstated his diplomatic title. In 2023, a museum will be opened in his family's abandoned mansion in Cabanas do Viriato.

lc/wd (AP, Reuters, AFP)