Carrying a controversial car to Kathmandu

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This slightly surreal photograph strikes us for two reasons. First of all, there’s the image itself, which looks more like it comes from a major Hollywood production rather than real life, but it’s the accompanying caption which really has us scratching our head: ‘Nepali men carrying the Mercedes-Benz that Adolf Hitler gifted to King Tribhuvan of Nepal in 1940.’

Both the car and the picture itself seem newer, don’t they? The Mercedes could well be post-war; the colour and sharpness of the picture suggests something similar. With Google Image search we found that the photograph is widely distributed all over the worldwide web with speculations about what we see going off in all different directions.

The most reliable sources seem to agree that the picture was taken in 1948 by German-born photographer Volkmar Kurt Wentzel on an assignment for National Geographic magazine. In January 1950 it appeared in that publication for the first time in an article by the American ornithologist Sidney Dillon Ripley. The caption there read (translated from German): ‘Instead of cars carrying workers, workers in Nepal carry cars down the rocky, hilly path of Kathmandu... This old German-made Mercedes is going to be traded in for a shiny American model in India.’

Another interesting article from the Nepali Times, dated December 2020, carries the headline: ‘Nepal’s last car porter dies’. From it, we learn ‘Hira Bahadur Ghalan, the last surviving porter who helped carry 25 vehicles into Kathmandu up and down mountain trails in the 1950s, has died in his home in Chitlang at the age of 89. In those days, stripped down automobile chassis used to be physically carried by up to nearly 100 porters from Bhimphedi to Thankot, because there was no motorable road to Kathmandu. The journey took the porters more than a week as they manoeuvred the load across steep and narrow mountain trails. After they reached Kathmandu, the cars were re-assembled and driven around the Valley’s few thoroughfares by Nepal’s Rana rulers.’

German magazine Der Spiegel had, by that time, dug deeper into the Mercedes's story. It simply asked Mercedes-Benz for clarification. “Unfortunately, we have no information”, the mighty motor manufacturer had replied in 2008. “Neither about the alleged gift from Hitler, nor about its delivery to Nepal or shipment to India.” However, the company added with almost total certainty that it showed ‘A Mercedes 230 Pullman Landaulet from 1937-1939.’ Der Spiegel also found that the car was probably used by a technical school in Kathmandu to train mechanics after the king's death in the 1950s and, best of all, it still survived.

Then there came a twist when the 92-year-old daughter of former Indian Prime Minister Juddha Shumsher came forward. She told The Kathmandu Post that the car was indeed gifted by Hitler but to her father in India, not to King Tribhuvan in Kathmandu, with the idea of getting Gurkha soldiers on his side in the Second World War. The car was going the other way, she said, from Nepal to India. The mystery remains, but the car is believed to be in the Narayanhiti Palace Museum in Kathmandu. Did it return there, or did it never leave Nepal after all?

A Nepalese government official said in September 2010 that the mighty Mercedes would be repaired, with visitors of the palace having a chance to be driven around the palace grounds ‘to give them an idea of the political changes the country has gone through’. A year later, The Kathmandu Post declared the project a failure: ‘There is lack of money; several vehicles belonging to the royal family will remain rotting in the museum grounds, including the gift from Germany.’ Is it still there now?

Words: Jeroen Booij; picture: Volkmar Kurt Wentzel
 

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