Byline: by Nicola Byrne
E VeRYTHING started to come back after a phone call out of the blue. For Liv Hempel, 75 years old and resident in America for more than half a century, her childhood in Ireland had become a distant memory. The youngest daughter of eduard Hempel -- Hitler's envoy to Ireland during the Second World War -- she had reinvented herself with a long and varied career in New York City before retiring to the desirable upstate village of Saltaire.
In the U.S., she was just another immigrant, albeit a well-loved and active member of her small community.
Few people knew about her past. But then, early last month, came a call from Whytes Auctioneers in Dublin which was to reawaken a whole chapter of her life.
A portrait by the respected Irish artist Patrick Hennessy, discovered in a Munich auction house, had caused a flurry of interest in the art world.
The pastel artwork, a striking depiction of a young Liv outside the Hempel family residence in Dun Laoghaire, had now found its way to Dublin and was to be re-auctioned in March. Auctioneer Ian Whyte had tracked her down through the internet to confirm it really was her in the 1939 picture, which is to be sold on March 14 with a guide price of [euro]2,000 to [euro]3,000.
Surprised and pleased, she verified its authenticity immediately, remembering the fine summer day when a young man had come to the family home and she had sat for him outside Gortleitragh, the elegant house set in spacious grounds on De Vesci Terrace. She was just four years old. Liv was also able to reveal that the portrait was one of a series -- the then up-and-coming Hennessy had also drawn her parents and her younger brother, Berthold.
A small article appeared in a newspaper confirming the picture's provenance and Liv thought no more of it until a few days later, when she received another altogether more astonishing phone call.
T He caller told her that her former nanny, elisabeth Sweeney, was alive and living in Achill Sound in Co. Mayo. More than six decades since the two women last saw each other, elisabeth had seen the article about the portrait.
'I was astounded -- I mean I couldn't believe it,' Liv told the Irish Daily Mail this week.
Despite spending 54 years in the U.S., her clipped German vowels are still very much in evidence.
'I really had no idea she was still alive -- I don't think she thought I was alive either,' she said. 'I was delighted. This is such an opportunity to find out more about my childhood.
There are so many things I don't remember.
'People expect me to remember everything about politics and my father and everything, but of course I don't. My memories of Ireland are mostly of Dun Laoghaire pier, walking there in the evenings with the fellas and the girls -- we had a wonderful time. For me, Ireland was a lovely place, with warm people who made us feel so welcome.
'Leaving there hurt so much, it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.' Ireland was just as much a sanctuary for elisabeth Sweeney as it was for Liv. Her surname suggests that she was an Irish girl hired to look after the envoy's children -- but she was actually a German baroness who had seized the chance to escape the turbulent situation in Germany by moving to Dublin with the Hempels.
Born elisabeth von Offenberg, she was born into an aristocratic German family that had settled in imperial Russia, but were forced to flee from the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution.
In 1919, the family escaped and went to Weimar Germany as refugees.
Destitute and with only the clothes on their backs, they were forced apart and elisabeth found herself in a children's home. When she was old enough, she went into service for a Jewish family in Nuremberg, but the Nazis forced them out of the city.
When she was 23, her family used old contacts to find her a home with eva and eduard Hemple -- whose mother was a Russian aristocrat -- just weeks before they travelled to Ireland.
eduard Hempel was being sent to Dublin by Hitler to take on the role of 'envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the German Reich to Ireland', the equivalent of today's German ambassador.
Because of her status as a baroness, elisabeth was introduced by the Hempels as a friend of the family and not their nanny. They supported her and provided her with pocket money and, in return, she looked after the couple's five children: Constantine, Andreas, Liv, Agnes and Berthold.
In 1937, the party -- including two aunts and a grandmother as well as elisabeth and the children -- arrived in Galway on a liner and made their way to the substantial residence provided by the German government in Dun Laoghaire. eduard Hempel was a career diplomat whose work was respected by the Government here, which held him in high esteem. Taoiseach Eamon de Valera and his ministers were regular visitors.
Through the years there has been criticism of Hempel's constant communication with Berlin -- where officials were intent on wooing Ireland as an ally -- and he has been accused of sending back weather reports that aided bombing missions.
However, Liv is at pains to point out her father was not initially a member of the Nazi party and she says her family never supported Hitler's ideologies.
'I saw a headline which described me as the daughter as of Hitler's envoy to Dublin and it was upsetting. That talk of Hitler and the Nazis, we never thought of it like that,' she said.
'It was just politics; my father was a diplomat and we were his family. He was just doing the job that he did before Hitler came along and after. We never any Nazi sympathies, never.' Her theory appears to be borne out by the historian John Duggan, who has written extensively on the period, including a 2003 book titled Herr Hempel At The German Legation In Dublin.
An expert in military history and Irish-German relations, Mr Duggan wrote: 'Dr Hempel was a conventional and cautious career diplomat who, like most of his contemporaries, agreed to represent Hitler's regime without sharing its ideological fanaticism.' Despite the emergency, there was a lively social scene in Dublin and the Hempels were wined and dined in the best homes in the capital.
Liv's older brothers had lots of friends and elisabeth, by then a striking young woman, made quite an impact on polite society, even dancing with de Valera at the Mansion House. It was, perhaps, this close friendship with the family that led the then taoiseach to make one of the biggest mistakes of his political career.
In 1945 when it was announced that Hitler had died, de Valera visited the Hempel home to offer his condolences.
The move caused a massive furore -- most notably in America where he was denounced on the front pages of The New York Times and Washington Post as a traitor.
His actions served to inflame Allied accusations that Ireland had secretly acted in favour of the Nazis throughout the war.
De Valera later insisted in the Dail that he had carried out Ireland's proper duty as a neutral nation, and that Herr Hempel was a representative of the German state and its people, not the Nazi government.
On a more personal note, it seems he had simply gone to visit a friend who was said to be in great distress.
In a letter to his friend Robert Brennan, the Irish minister in Washington, later that year de Valera wrote: 'During the whole of the war, Dr Hempel's conduct was irreproachable.
He was always friendly and invariably correct... I was certainly not going to add to his humiliation in the hour of defeat.' LIV remembers that there were mixed feelings towards Germany and the Nazi party in Dublin during the Emergency. 'I think it's quite exaggerated how pro-German the Irish were,' she said. 'Yes, there were some people who strongly supported Hitler and the war and all that, but I think there was a 50/50 split between pro and anti.
'You have to remember that a lot of Irish were fighting with the British army. I remember a neighbour of ours in Dublin, he was a chap serving with the RAF and I remember him saying to us how sorry he was about some of the bombing he'd done over Germany. But of course it wasn't his fault. It was a terrible time for everyone.' Elizabeth had left the Hempels' employ in 1943. 'Although the Hempels were very kind to me and I had a lovely time, it was time for me to go and make my own life,' she said in a recent interview.
Initially, she took a room in Dublin and earned a living by giving German lessons. Later, she was invited by an Irish friend of the Hempel family to go to Achill to help run a hotel at Keel. There she met and married a local man, initially living in a cottage without running water -- the antithesis of the style she had been accustomed to at Gortleitragh. The last time she and Liv saw each other was at a meeting of all German citizens in Ireland convened by Eduard Hempel at the family home in 1945.
The gathering was told that Hitler had committed suicide and the German army had been defeated. On May 9, 1945 Hempel notified the Irish external affairs ministry that he 'regarded his mission as terminated'.
The family were granted asylum here, but it was the end of an idyllic spell in Dun Laoghaire for Liv and her siblings.
'The end of the war changed everything for us,' she says bluntly, her voice trembling a little. 'Everything ended for us. My father was forbidden to work by the Allies. Our private tutor was gone and I went to school at Loreto in Foxrock. We had to get out of our lovely house.
'We moved to a much smaller house at Rosehill in Blackrock. The Dun Laoghaire home was burned down by arson after we left. We really had no money and were barely making it. The my mother started a bakery called Olga's, which kept us going, but there were no holidays or anything like that.
'Still, I remember it as a very happy time and I was so sad when the time came for us to return to Germany. I really didn't want to leave,' she said. 'My parents left early in 1950 and I finished out my intermediate certificate at Loreto in June and followed them on.
'I still get letters and Christmas cards from the boys and girls I used to walk with on Dun Laoghaire pier. One man who lives in Dalkey recently wrote to me and said: "You know times are hard in Ireland now but back then we really had nothing, but we were happy." And that's very true.' Eduard Hempel returned to a job in the German diplomatic service, his ambivalence towards the Nazis eventually being recognised by the new regime at home.
He died in the family home in Freiburg in 1972 and was survived by his wife Eva.
Berthold Hempel passed away tragically in 1948. His brothers had remained in Ireland. Andreas studied medicine at Trinity College and becoming an ophthalmologist in London, where he still lives.
Constantine, known as Costa, worked as a journalist on the Carlow Nationalist and the Irish Times.
He later emigrated to England where he became a property developer and in 1971, married the New Zealand-born actress Anne Geissler who adopted the name Anouska Hempel for her role as a Bond girl in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
Their marriage was short-lived however, as Costa died in 1973 in a car crash in London. Ned Ryan, the bon viveur from Co. Tipperary who became a close friend of Princess Margaret, was in the passenger seat when Costa died.
Agnes and Liv Hempel returned to Germany with their parents, where Agnes still lives. Liv remembers their homecoming as another traumatic chapter in their childhood.
'It was very tough and it made us tough. People were very bitter at us, they thought we'd escaped the worst of the war being out of the country. Coping with that anger made us what we are.' Liv completed her secondary education and went on to university.
She soon met and fell in love with Leslie Miller, a serviceman from Arkansas who was stationed in Germany. She followed him to the U.S. but the relationship soon fizzled out.
'He found it very difficult readjusting to life in the States and he ended it. I met him twice subsequently and we parted on good terms,' she said.
Liv found a job as a doctor's secretary on Park Avenue in Manhattan and went on to work as an investigator for the New York State inspector general's office. She never married. Now retired, she lives in a 'lovely seaside village' where the slow pace of life sometimes reminds her of Ireland. Her niece lives in New York and often visits with her two young children.W HEN her mother died in 1993, Liv returned with her sister to clear out the family home in Freiburg and found the portraits by Patrick Hennessy in the attic. They were sold and Liv had forgotten all about her portrait until Whytes called. 'We had both accumulated enough stuff so we put them on the market. It was such a surprise when they turned up again,' she said.
After the phone call, Liv wasted no time in contacting her former nanny, now aged 96, whom she had always affectionately called 'Bop'. She found her 'lucid and in excellent health' and already has plans to travel to Co. Mayo to visit her.
The last time Liv was in Achill was before the end of the war, when the family had gone to visit Elisabeth.
She still has vivid memories of her childhood adventures there.
One day, a rumour swept the island that a Canadian Air Force pilot had been washed up on a local beach. Liv and Costa crept out that evening to see if they could find the body.
'We crawled over the grass and we found him. The police had just left him there unattended until the people came to take him away. That's the way it was in those days. I always remember the poor chap, his watch was still ticking.
'We got into trouble about it of course, but it was real adventure... That's the sort of thing I remember about Ireland.'
CAPTION(S):
Respected: Liv's father Eduard Hempel inspects the guard of honour on arrival at Dublin Castle
Idyll: Patrick Hennessy's portrait of Liv in the garden at Gortleitragh
Out of step: The Hempel family were granted asylum after the war but were they had to leave their beloved home in Dun Laoghaire
Regret: Liv, pictured at age 22, was sad to leave Ireland
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