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News cut about the Blue Division in the Portuguese edition of "Signal" magazine.
("Signal" magazine, Portuguese edition, December 1942)

About 150 Portuguese wore the uniform of the Blue Division, a volunteer unit formed in Spain to fight with the Germans on the Russian front between 1941 and 1944.

This information was confirmed for the first time by researcher Ricardo Silva, from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, during the Conference Portugal and the Holocaust that took place in October 2012 at the Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon. The following year, the same researcher collaborated on the publication of a special issue of the magazine "Visão História" dedicated entirely to the subject.

Ricardo Silva consulted approximately 47,000 individual files of the division men and other documentation in the archives in Alcalá de Henares, on the outskirts of Madrid, where most of the documentation relating to the Blue Division is located. Also researched were the Documentation Centre for Historical Memory, in Salamanca, and several archives in Portugal.

At least fifty of these Portuguese men were part of the first contingent that left Madrid and entered combat on the Eastern Front in the autumn/winter of 1941. By the end of the conflict, around twenty Portuguese had lost their lives fighting for the division. Two had been taken prisoner and only one of them would return to Spain in 1954, when around 200 Spanish prisoners were allowed to return to their country.

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Propaganda photographs of the Blue Division published in Portugal.
(Revista "Sinal",  edição de setembro de 1943; póster da organização "Combatentes da Juventude Académica da Europa")

The Blue Division was formed by dictator Francisco Franco after the Spanish Civil War and its ranks were filled with around 47,000 volunteers, including 500 foreigners, with the Portuguese being the largest group represented, explained Ricardo Silva, who reconstructed the biographies of each of the Portuguese combatants.

The Blue Division fought on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union, taking part in Operation Barbarossa in 1941, on the Leningrad and Stalingrad fronts. "Around two-thirds of the Portuguese enlisted in the Blue Division had already fought alongside Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War", explains Ricardo Silva, adding that among the Portuguese "there was a mix of ideology, Catholicism, anti-communism and adventure".

In total, around five thousand men from the Blue Division died in combat and about 400 were taken prisoner.

It is not easy an easy investigation as there are still pending cases. Some seem to have Portuguese names, but appear to have been born in Spain and there are doubts regarding some of the names that have already been found.

Ricardo Silva does not rule out the possibility that there were also Portuguese who fought in other German formations and he is almost certain that there were some among the SS.

Carlos Guerreiro