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Despite the authoritarian character of the regime, Portugal did not experience the same levels of international isolation as Francoist Spain did following World War II. Unlike Spain, Portugal under Salazar was accepted into the Marshall Plan (1947–1948) in return for the aid it gave to the Allies during the final stages of the war.
When the civil war ended in 1939, Portugal and Spain negotiated the Treaty of Friendship and Nonaggression (Iberian Pact). The pact committed the two countries to defend the Iberian Peninsula against any power that attacked either country and helped to ensure Iberian neutrality during World War II.
Later, Philip IV tried to make Portugal a Spanish province, and Portuguese nobles lost power. Because of this, as well as the general strain on the finances of the Spanish throne as a result of the Thirty Years' War , the Duke of Braganza , one of the native noblemen and a descendant of King Manuel I, was proclaimed King of Portugal as John IV ...
Portugal was officially neutral during World War II and the period of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe.The country had been ruled by an authoritarian political regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar but had not been significantly influenced by racial antisemitism and was considered more sympathetic to the Allies than was neighbouring Francoist Spain.
During World War II, 1939–1945, Portugal remained officially neutral, giving its highest priority to avoiding a Nazi invasion of the sort that was so devastating in most other European countries. The regime at first showed some pro- Axis sympathies; Salazar for example expressed approval for the German invasion of the Soviet Union .
The neutral powers were countries that remained neutral during World War II.Some of these countries had large colonies abroad or had great economic power. Spain had just been through its civil war, which ended on 1 April 1939 (five months prior to the invasion of Poland)—a war that involved several countries that subsequently participated in World War II.
The principal reason for the neutrality of Portugal in World War II was strategic, and within the compass of the overall objectives of the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance. This modest, but complex role allowed Portugal to rescue a large number of war refugees. [99] Portugal's official nationalism was not grounded in race or biology.
Operation Alacrity was the code name for a possible Allied seizure of Azores during World War II. It never took place because Portugal agreed to an Allied request for use of air bases. The islands were of enormous strategic value in the defeat of the German U-boats. Portugal, too weak to defend the Azores, or its large colonial empire, or even ...