US Consulate Lisbon Passport 1943: A Rare Wartime Find
A 17-Year-Old Girl, Twin Brothers, and a Lisbon Passport That Survived the War
When I first held this passport, I knew I was looking at something extraordinary. Not because of the stamps, though there are some wonderful ones. Not because of the document’s scarcity, though consular passports issued from neutral Lisbon in 1943 are among the hardest wartime American documents to find. What stopped me was the human story pressed between these pages: a teenage girl named Lourdes Jesus Duarte, her younger twin brothers, and a two-month exit window stamped in ink that said, plainly, get home while you still can.
This is the kind of document that makes passport collecting feel less like philately and more like archaeology.
Portugal Was the Last Door Open in a Continent Under Siege
In 1943, with most of Europe under German occupation or Nazi influence, the neutral nations were the only places where American consular services still functioned.
By the time this passport was issued on March 11, 1943, the United States had lost access to nearly every consulate and embassy across occupied Europe. The State Department had already invalidated all standard U.S. passports for European travel in September 1939, meaning any American caught abroad had to appear periodically at a functioning consulate to have their travel document revalidated, typically only for the direct route home. The system was not designed for comfort. It was designed for extraction.
Only a handful of neutral nations kept their American diplomatic posts open: Argentina, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey. Lisbon, operating through the U.S. Legation in neutral Portugal, became one of the most strategically vital consular posts in the world.
How Quickly the Map Went Dark: A Collector’s Reference Timeline
The closure of U.S. consulates across Europe and Asia between 1939 and 1943 explains precisely why wartime consular documents are so scarce, and why collectors who find them should treat them seriously.
Here is the closure chronology I’ve assembled, with direct sourcing from State Department records shared with me by Lindsay H. at the Department of State, whose detailed information has made my evaluation of wartime documents considerably more accurate:
Western Europe
- Amsterdam: closed July 10, 1941
- Antwerp: closed July 15, 1940
- Brussels: closed July 15, 1940
- Bordeaux: closed June 15, 1941
- Paris: closed October 21, 1940
- Vichy: opened July 1941, closed ~November 8, 1942 (Vichy post issued no passports/visas; American nationals were directed to Marseille)
- Lyon: closed November 8, 1942
- Marseille: closed November 8, 1942
Central and Eastern Europe
- Prague: closed March 21, 1939
- Warsaw: closed July 15, 1941
- Budapest: closed December 11, 1941
- Vienna (Consulate General): closed July 9, 1941
German Posts
- Berlin: closed July 15, 1941
- Bremen: closed July 10, 1941
- Cologne: closed August 11, 1941
- Dresden: closed July 10, 1941
- Frankfurt: closed July 15, 1941
- Hamburg: closed July 9, 1941
- Leipzig: closed August 14, 1941
- Munich: closed July 15, 1941
- Stuttgart: closed July 2, 1941
Italy
- Genoa: closed July 9, 1941
- Naples: closed February 28, 1941
- Rome: closed June 30, 1941
- Venice: closed June 30, 1941
Asia and the Pacific
- Tokyo: closed December 7, 1941
- Kobe: closed December 7, 1941
- Yokohama: closed December 7, 1941
- Osaka: closed December 8, 1941
- Nagasaki: closed June 30, 1941 (notably prior to Pearl Harbor)
- Beijing: closed December 7, 1941
- Shanghai: closed December 8, 1941
- Guangzhou: closed December 7, 1941
- Hong Kong: closed December 31, 1941
- Singapore: closed February 9, 1942
- Bangkok: closed January 25, 1942
- Manila: closed September 3, 1943 (the date consular officers were evacuated aboard the SS Gripsholm, the Swedish-flagged repatriation vessel)
- Batavia (Jakarta): closed December 27, 1942
- Medan: closed February 16, 1942
- Surabaya: closed February 22, 1942
- Guilin: opened May 21, 1943, closed September 11, 1944
- Fuzhou: closed January 31, 1942
- Guangzhou: closed December 7, 1941
- Harbin: closed December 8, 1941
- Hankou: closed December 7, 1941
- Jinan: closed December 7, 1941
- Macau: closed December 24, 1941
- Nanjing: closed December 7, 1941
- Dalian: closed December 8, 1941
Posts across the Americas, Africa, and India were not affected and remained fully operational throughout the war. But with the entire country mobilized for the war effort and leisure travel essentially nonexistent, there was little reason for civilians to use them. This is precisely why passports from functioning wartime posts like Lisbon are so scarce in terms of collector supply: demand for new issuances was minimal outside of genuine emergency travel.
Passport No. 14: Lourdes, the Twin Brothers, and a Two-Month Window
This particular document, U.S. Legation Lisbon Passport No. 14, issued March 11, 1943, belongs to a category of American wartime document that I rarely encounter.
The passport was issued by the vice-consul to Lourdes Jesus Duarte and her twin brothers. Lourdes was born in 1926, making her just 17 years old at the time of issuance. The twins’ ages are not recorded in the document, but based on the passport photograph, I would place them at roughly 14 or 15. These were children navigating a continent at war.
The endorsement on page seven is among the most telling features of the document. The passport was validated solely for return to the United States, with a validity period of exactly two months: through May 1943. This was not a travel document in any conventional peacetime sense. It was a conditional exit authorization, bureaucratically narrow by design.
Page nine carries an additional Lisbon Legation stamp. Page eleven shows a Portuguese visa, a reminder that even in neutral Portugal, movement required documentation and official approval.
Three Years Later: The 1946 Renewals and the Road Home
What transforms this document from a wartime curiosity into a truly layered collector piece is what happens three years after the original issuance.
Pages 12 and 13 show two passport renewals, both dated May 22, 1946, signed by Vice-Consul Worthington E. Hagerman of Carmel, Indiana. One extension validates the passport through March 11, 1946. The other extends it through November 22, 1946. The discrepancy in dates on a pair of renewals executed on the same day is itself a small archival puzzle, though not unprecedented in the administrative chaos of immediate postwar consular operations.
Worthington E. Hagerman had a long career in U.S. consular service before appearing in this document. He was first appointed as a clerk at the American Consulate General in Paris in 1919, and subsequently served at multiple posts across France, including Bordeaux, before his assignment to Lisbon.
Page 15 closes the story with exit stamps from Portugal dated May 6, 1946, recording the family’s final departure for the United States. There is no arrival stamp on the American side, which was typical of the era.
What Lourdes and her brothers were doing in Portugal between 1943 and 1946 is not recorded in the passport itself. That ambiguity is part of what makes the document so compelling. They arrived as wartime strays in neutral Lisbon, granted a two-month window to go home, and somehow remained for three more years. The stamps tell us the official story. The human story lives in the gaps.
Why Lisbon Consular Passports of This Era Belong in a Serious Collection
For collectors specializing in American wartime travel documents, a U.S. Legation Lisbon passport from 1943 represents one of the most contextually rich and verifiably scarce document categories available.
The scarcity argument is structural, not speculative. With the overwhelming majority of U.S. consulates across Europe and Asia shuttered between 1940 and 1942, the number of American passports issued or renewed through functioning neutral-country posts was drastically limited. Passport No. 14 from the Lisbon Legation in March 1943, covering three American minors, with Portuguese visa stamps, dual postwar renewals, and confirmed exit documentation, is exactly the kind of multi-layered document that serious wartime passport collections are built around.
I acquired this as the only example of its kind I have been able to bring into my personal collection in 2020. If you are building a collection of U.S. wartime documents, or you have an interest in the diplomatic geography of neutral Europe in WWII, pieces like this one deserve close attention.
For broader context on how American consular services functioned under wartime strain, the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State maintains detailed records and Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes covering consular operations across this period.
I occasionally release select documents from my personal collection when I decide it is time for them to find a new home. You can view current offerings at passport-collector.com before they are gone.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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