The Telegraph, July 6, 2008
Mandira Nayar
She’s royalty and an ageless beauty, an international celebrity with a World War II and Nazi past. And at 72, she’s elusive as hell, leading two countries a merry dance.
Excited Dehra Dun residents had reported a flurry of “sightings” in the past three weeks after learning she could be hiding in their midst.
But now it appears that the olive green 1936 Mercedes-Benz that Adolf Hitler had gifted the Nepal palace in 1939 has given the hill town the slip just as surely as she took Kathmandu’s new government for a ride the other day.
All the excitement began when Nepal’s new republic, after turning King Gyanendra out of Narayanhitti and declaring the palace a museum, said the Hitler car would now be displayed as its star exhibit.
Only if they could find it, though. The car was apparently not in Nepal but in Dehra Dun with the descendants of the Rana family who were Nepal’s Prime Ministers for generations, and its de facto rulers between 1846 and 1953.
And sure enough, old-timers here swear they often saw the custom-made car parked at the Rana mansion on Guru Road. But that was decades ago.
The Ranas say the car was brought to Dehra Dun by Juddha Shumshere Jang Bahadur Rana, Prime Minister from 1932 to 1945, when he settled in India after handing power over to his nephew.
They bristle at any suggestion that Juddha had usurped what belonged to the Shah king, saying the Fuhrer had gifted the car to the powerful Prime Minister and not King Tribhuvan, probably to buy the fierce Gorkha fighters’ loyalty.
“It was my father-in-law’s,” said Chandra Rajya Laxmi Rana, 75, who had travelled in the Merc many times. “He gave it to my mother-in-law. Then it passed to my husband, Colonel Shashi Shumshere.
“It came to our house after my mother-in-law died in 1955. It was parked there. But I don’t know where it is now.”
Colonel Shashi died in 1988, taking with him the details of what happened to the car, she said.
The Ranas don’t want to talk about the car, uncertain about their future following the Nepal revolution and unwilling to see their links to the deposed Shah dynasty brought under the spotlight again. But they believe in the Shahs’ right to the throne, unlike the Merc.
“Gyanendra was the only Hindu king,” said Amrita Rana, granddaughter of Juddha. “The monarchy has been around in Nepal for 240 years. We can’t help but feel sad.”
“There is a belief, however, that Gyanendra will come back. His horoscope says so,” said Biyoya Sawian Singh, wife of Alark Singh, great-grandson of Deb Shumshere Jang Bahadur, the first Rana to settle in India.
The Ranas hope the people of Nepal would reinstate Gyanendra, if only as a titular head.
If Nepal has spurned its royals, Dehra Dun hasn’t had much time for its hallowed old four-wheelers either before the hoopla over the Hitler car.
The town once hosted a vintage-car rally but it was stopped after residents protested the cars were ruining their air.
One of the cars in the rally was the 1930 Studebaker Dictator that Nathuram Godse had driven to Birla House on January 30, 1948, to shoot the Mahatma dead.
“It used to be here and participated in a rally a few years ago,” said Vijay Aggarwal, a garage owner who restores old cars in Dehra Dun. The car, aptly named “Killer”, is now in Delhi.
Lady Edwina Mountbatten’s Jaguar, however, seems to have made the Uttarakhand capital its permanent home. Owned by Chaya Khanna, a schoolteacher with Scholar’s Home, it has collectors salivating but will not be sold.
“Mrs Khanna loves it. It was her husband’s,” a vintage-car expert said.
Compared with Hitler’s disappearing Merc, Lady Edwina’s car is having a rather quiet life, retired in a corner of a garage.
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