Talk:Carlos Sampaio Garrido

"Hungarian Gestapo"

Please clarify what "Hungarian Gestapo" means. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 03:39, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Checked sources and changed it to "Hungarian political police". Thank you Cullen328 for reviewing the article. JPratas (talk) 15:58, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Removed Comparison with Aristides Sousa Mendes and other inaccuracies.

I've removed the comparison with Sousa Mendes because there are many differences between Carlos Sampaio Garrido, Carlos de Liz-Texeira Branquinho and Aristides Sousa Mendes:

• Mendes was a consul while Garrido and Branquinho were diplomats. Consuls were lower rank officials in charge of bureaucratic work, not diplomacy.
• Mendes always had a very problematic career. He was disciplined several times, by different political regimes, including for using public money for his own private use. He was also expelled from the US. The US Department of State canceled his consular exequatur which prevented him from continuing his consular services in the US (due to anti-democratic behaviour.
• Garrido and Branquinho issued visas to jews in Hungary 1944 risking their lives while Mendes started issuing illegal visas in 1939, during the phoney war and to all nationalities.
• Mendes was discharged, among other reasons, because the British Embassy in Lisbon sent a letter to the Portuguese Foreign Office accusing Sousa Mendes of "deferring until after office hours all applications for visas" as well as "charging them at a special rate" and requiring at least one refugee "to contribute to a Portuguese charitable fund before the visa was granted.
• In May 1940 Mendes forged a passport, i.e. committed a crime, to help a Luxembourg citizen, Paul Miny to escape from the army.
• Garrido and Branquinho issued Visas with Salazar's permission, therefore they did not put at risk Portugal's neutrality (the same neutrality that saved many lives).

And some inaccuracies:

• In addition saying that Mendes was "sacked" is inaccurate. Sousa Mendes was listed in the Portuguese Consular and Diplomatic Yearbook until 1954. It is true that he was punished with one-year punishment with half-pay but after that he received until his death in 1954 a monthly payment of 1,593 Portuguese escudos per month corresponding to a full consul's salary.

• Yad Vashem historian Avraham Milgram says that : "It was probably Harry Ezratty who was the first to mention in an article published in 1964 that Sousa Mendes had saved 30,000 refugees, of which 10,000 were Jews, a number which has since then been repeated automatically by journalists and academics. That is, Ezratty, imprudently, took the total number of Jewish refugees who passed through Portugal and ascribed it to the work of Aristides de Sousa Mendes....discrepancy between the reality and the myth of the number of visas granted by Sousa Mendes is great. A similar opinion is shared by British historian Neill Lochery. In 2011, Lochery quoted Milgram´s numbers and to further support his view he also cross checked numbers with the Portuguese Emigration Police files and he also concluded that the numbers usually published by popular literature are a “Myth”. Also In 2008 the Portuguese ambassador João Hall Themido took a stand affirming that in his opinion the Sousa Mendes story was a Myth and asserting his disbelief in the 30,000 figure

J Pratas 07:03, 6 June 2015 (UTC)