Download Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939–1945 AudioBook Free

Throughout the Second World War, Lisbon was at the very centre of the world's attention and was the only Western european city in which both Allies and the Axis power openly operated. Portugal was frantically hoping to hold to its self-proclaimed wartime neutrality however in reality was more and more caught in the middle of the financial, and naval, wars between the Allies and the Nazis. The storyplot is not, however, a typical story of World War II in that barely a shot was fired or a bomb lowered. Instead, it is a gripping story of intrigue, betrayal, opportunism, and double-dealing, which occurred in the Cidade da Luz and along its idyllic Atlantic coastline. It's the story of how a relatively poor Western european country not only survived the battle physically intact but arrived of it in 1945 much wealthier than it turned out when battle broke out in 1939. Portugal's emergence as a prosperous European Union land would be financed partly, it turns out, by the cache of Nazi gold. During the battle, Lisbon was a temporary home to a lot of Europe's exiled royalty, over one million refugees seeking passage to the US, and to a bunch of spies, secret authorities, captains of industry, bankers, prominent Jews, authors and musicians and artists, escaped POWs, and dark marketeers. An operations official writing in 1944 explained the daily scene at Lisbon's airport terminal to be like the movie Casablanca - times twenty. Within this riveting narrative, renowned historian Neill Lochery pulls on his human relationships with high-level Portuguese connections, records just lately uncovered from Portuguese secret police and banking archives, and other unpublished documents to offer a revelatory family portrait of the war's backstage.

Category: Classics