Sousa Mendes Family Wins Victory In Portuguese Courts — “The most important thing was not the money, it was the truth”

OCTOBER 2, 2025. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. Grandchildren of Aristides de Sousa Mendes reach agreement in lawsuit for “offense to the memory” of their grandfather. Grandchildren waive compensation of €100,000 and receive acknowledgment from the defendants that Aristides de Sousa Mendes never sold visas and that his family members did not embezzle funds.

The lawsuit filed by four grandchildren of Aristides de Sousa Mendes against O Diabo, two former directors of the newspaper, and two authors of articles that, according to the relatives of the former consul, relied on “distortions and concealment of historical facts” to defame his image, seeking to lead the public to conclude that Sousa Mendes “was a fraud invented to attack Salazar,” ended in a settlement. In the end, the claim for compensation was dropped, and what remained was the acknowledgment, by the surviving defendants, that the former consul in Bordeaux, who saved thousands of Jews during the Second World War, never sold visas to refugees, and that his descendants never misappropriated funds allocated by the State.

It was a long process, which began in 2019, and threatened to become even more protracted when the judge who had presided over the trial from the outset was replaced due to illness, meaning that the sessions already held were rendered invalid and everything, including the hearing of witnesses who had already appeared, would have to be repeated. This, combined with the unpredictability of the outcome, given that freedom of expression was at stake, and the death in 2019 of one of the main defendants in the case, former ambassador Carlos Fernandes, led the parties to reconcile their positions and reach an agreement in which no one got exactly what they wanted, but in which “the essentials” for the representative of Aristides de Sousa Mendes’ family are safeguarded.

The center of the case was a series of articles published in the newspaper O Diabo (and replicated in blogs and other publications), with an interview with former ambassador Carlos Fernandes as the centerpiece. In this article, which was ostensibly about the launch of the diplomat’s book, Consul Aristides Sousa Mendes – A verdade e a Mentira (Consul Aristides Sousa Mendes – The Truth and the Lie), he made several disparaging remarks about the personal life and mental health of the former consul in Bordeaux, as well as stating that “he did not save anyone, because no one’s life was in danger, and he did not give visas to anyone for free, because he needed the money.”

Hiding behind the fact that the Wannsee Conference, at which the so-called “final solution” for the Jews was decided by high-ranking officials of the Nazi regime, only took place in January 1942, the ambassador reiterated that in 1940, when Aristides de Sousa Mendes issued visas to thousands of refugees who wanted to reach Portugal, fleeing the war, the consul “did not save anyone, because in 1940 no one’s life was at risk.” This statement deliberately ignores, in the opinion of the plaintiffs, the fact that the repression and murder of Adolf Hitler’s opponents and Jews began much earlier, with the regime’s first concentration camp, in Dachau, opening in 1933, when the Nazis came to power.

Denying the Holocaust
These allegations, along with others directly targeting the descendants of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, accused of misusing hundreds of thousands of euros allocated by the State as compensation and intended for the purchase and renovation of Casa do Passal (which opened to the public as a museum last year), led four grandchildren of the former consul of Bordeaux to take legal action. In the initial petition, in addition to considering that those targeted had committed an “offense to the memory of the late” consul of Bordeaux and an offense to the honor of his descendants, it was also considered that the statements regarding the absence of risk to the lives of Jews constituted a denial of the Holocaust and the crimes humanity committed by the Nazi regime.

The grandchildren of Aristides de Sousa Mendes demanded compensation of €100,000, the publication of the final decision in the case “with publicity similar to that given to the disclosure of those facts,” and an order for the defendants to “refrain from publishing, by any means whatsoever, statements similar” to those that called into question the good name of the former consul.

Seven years later, the agreement reached was much more modest. The plaintiffs withdrew their initial claims, and the defendants who are still alive “acknowledge that the late consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes never sold visas to refugees and have no evidence that the plaintiffs or any other descendants of Aristides de Sousa Mendes misappropriated any funds allocated by the State,” according to the agreement accessed by Público. In the case of Carlos Fernandes, now deceased, his heirs, two nephews, “declare that they never made any statements about the late consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes, that they never intended to do so, and that they have no knowledge of his activities as consul in Bordeaux, nor do they have any evidence that the authors or any other descendants of Consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes misappropriated any funds allocated by the Portuguese State.”

Ensuring the “essentials”
Although it may seem little, given what was requested, the lawyer for the family of the former consul of Bordeaux, Afonso Duarte, considers that the “essential” has been safeguarded. “In this case, the essential issue was to restore the truth of the facts. This began with a series of articles, which were repeatedly quoted and cited, all published in far-right publications such as O Diabo and others, which claimed that Aristides de Sousa Mendes had sold visas to people crowded at the border and that these people were not even in danger of their lives. This was the essential point, the most serious issue,” he says.

Afonso Duarte believes that this theory was merely a perpetuation of the “propaganda” of António Oliveira Salazar’s regime, inserted “into a far-right agenda, which involves whitewashing the memory of the odious and settling scores with those who fought him.” Restoring the truth was therefore the most important thing. Gerald de Sousa Mendes, one of the grandsons of the former consul who brought the case before the Lisbon District Court, agrees. “The most important thing was not the money, it was the truth. To say that Aristides had sold visas was a big lie, totally fabricated. Even in the disciplinary proceedings at the time, these accusations were not proven. We know more than 4,000 names of visa recipients and we never heard a single reference from anyone saying that he had sold them,“ he stresses. The agreement, he admits, cannot be considered a victory (”victory is a big word,“ he says), preferring to describe it as ”an acceptable compromise.”

Francisco Teixeira da Mota, who represented two of the five defendants, also believes that reaching an agreement was the best outcome for all parties. “The case dragged on for various reasons, and one of the main targets, Ambassador Carlos Fernandes, has since passed away, so it was understood that the best thing to do was to reach a consensus. We were facing another year or two of trial, with the costs involved, and it was understood that it did not make sense to continue,” he says.

The above text is the English translation of Patrícia Carvalho, “Netos de Aristides de Sousa Mendes chegam a acordo no processo por ‘ofensa à memória’ do avô,” Público, September 27, 2025. To access the original article, click here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION please contact info@sousamendesfoundation.org or (877) 797-9759.