A brilliantly researched narrative history of "the real Casablanca"--the city which during World War Two saw no fighting but was cluttered with spies from all nations, displaced European royalty and furtive bankers and businessmen seeking to protect their wealth from the destruction all around them. Lisbon had a pivotal role in the history of World War II, though not a gun was fired there. The only European city in which both the Allies and the Axis power operated openly, it was a temporary home to much of Europe's exiled royalty, over one million refugees seeking passage to the US and a host of spies, secret police, captains of industry, bankers, prominent Jews, writers and artists, escaped POWs, and black marketeers. An operations officer writing in 1944 described the daily scene at Lisbon's airport as being like the movie Casablanca, times twenty. IN this riveting narrative, renowned historian Neill Lochery draws on his relationships with high-level Portuguese contacts, access to records recently uncovered from Portuguese secret police and banking archives, and other unpublished documents to offer a revelatory portrait of the War's back stage. And he tells the story of how the Portugal, a relatively poor European country trying frantically to remain neutral amidst extraordinary pressures, survived the war not only physically intact but significantly wealthier. The country's emergence as a prosperous European Union nation would be financed in part, it turns out, by a cache of Nazi gold.