A lost portrait of the wife of the controversial wartime German ambassador to Ireland has been unearthed in Budapest – thanks to the Irish Mail.

The find came a decade-and-a-half after the Mail on Sunday published a story about a similar painting of the ambassador’s daughter by the same artist.

Two art enthusiasts bought the portrait of Eva Hempel, wife of ambassador Eduard Hempel, from a local dealer in Hungary.

Curious to find out more about the unusual painting, they started to research online and found our 2011 article about a similar painting in the same style. 

This portrait was also painted by the renowned Irish artist Patrick Hennessy. It featured Liv Hempel, Eva’s daughter, and was auctioned in 2011.

The Hungarian couple made contact with the MoS regarding the provenance of their painting, and this week Liv Hempel – who is now 91 years old – confirmed the portrait is indeed of her mother.

The painting will be auctioned in Whyte’s auction house in Dublin on May 25 with a guide price of between €4,000 and €6,000.

Auctioneer Ian Whyte said the painting was ‘a rare find and of great historic interest as well as being a fine example of Patrick Hennessy’s earliest work’.

The historical interest stems largely from then-taoiseach Eamon de Valera’s ill-judged offer of condolences on Hitler’s death to Ambassador Hempel on behalf of the nation.

The move caused a furore, particularly 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 Dáil 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.

The truth was that de Valera had come to know the Hempels personally and was even photographed dancing with their governess at a dance in Dublin’s Mansion House.

Despite the Emergency – as World War Two was known in Ireland – there was a lively social scene in Dublin and the Hempels were wined and dined in the best homes in the capital. They even counted WB Yeats and his wife Georgie among their close friends.

Liv is at pains to point out that her father was not a member of the Nazi party and her family never supported Hitler’s ideologies.

She tells the MoS: ‘I saw a headline which described me as the daughter of Hitler’s envoy to Dublin and it was upsetting.

‘That talk of Hitler and the Nazis, we never thought of it like that.

‘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 had 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 entitled 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.’

In a letter to his friend Robert Brennan, the Irish First Minister to the US, de Valera wrote in 1945: ‘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.’

Verifying the authenticity of her mother’s portrait this week, Liv Hempel says she still remembers the fine summer day when a young man came to the family home and the family sat for him outside Gortleitragh, the elegant house set in spacious grounds at De Vesci Terrace in Dún Laoghaire. She was just four years old.

She also reveals the portrait was one of a series and the then up-and-coming artist Hennessy had also drawn her parents and her younger brother, Berthold.

Despite spending 69 years in the US, her clipped German vowels are still very much in evidence.

She says of her mother’s portrait: ‘I remember, and memories are coming back, I never liked that picture very much, and neither did my mother. She looked so stiff in it.’

Liv says her family did not sell the paintings but that they disappeared when an administrator closed up her parents’ house in the 1980s.

‘We never knew what happened to them but I’d heard they went to a German dealer.

‘It’s so interesting that they are reappearing one by one.’

However, a painting of her ambassador father has yet to be unearthed.

Liv remembers 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 says. ‘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.’

After the war, the Hempel family were granted political asylum by the Irish government.

‘The end of the war changed everything for us,’ she recalls, 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 Dún Laoghaire home was burned down by arson after we left. We really had no money and were barely making it.

‘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 recalls.

Her parents went back to Germany in 1950, where Dr Hempel helped establish a new diplomatic service for the former West Germany. He and his wife returned to Dublin in 1954 to collect furniture they had left in storage. Her brother Berthold had died tragically from a brain haemorrhage in 1948. Her two remaining brothers initially stayed in Ireland.

Andreas studied medicine at Trinity College and became an ophthalmologist in London, where he died in 2016.

Constantine, known as Costa, worked as a journalist on the Carlow Nationalist and the Irish Times. He married a Foxrock woman, Patricia Keane, whom he later divorced before going on to marry an actress, Anne Geissler, better known as Bond girl Anouska Hempel. He died in a car crash in London in 1973.

Liv and her sister Agnes returned to Germany after their studies at Loreto College ended. There she met and fell in love with Leslie Miller, a serviceman from Arkansas. She followed him to the US 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 says.

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.

Ireland was just as much a sanctuary for Liv’s governess, Elisabeth Sweeney, as it was for her.

Her surname suggests she was an Irish girl hired to look after the ambassador’s children, but she was actually a German baroness who moved to Dublin with the Hempels. Elisabeth von Offenberg was born into an aristocratic German family who had settled in imperial Russia but fled from the Bolshevik Revolution.

In 1943, after she left the Hempels’ Dún Laoghaire home, Elisabeth moved to Achill Island to help run a hotel and married a local man, Niall Sweeney.

Initially the couple lived in a cottage without running water, a far cry from the style she had been accustomed to throughout her life.

She died aged 101 in 2015 but not before she and Liv were reunited one last time, after Elisabeth read the newspaper article about Liv’s portrait in 2011 and contacted her.

Liv told the MoS in 2011: ‘I was astounded. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. I really had no idea she was still alive. I don’t think she thought I was alive either. I was delighted.’

Liv says she still remembers visiting Elisabeth in Achill before the end of the war, with her siblings.

One day, a rumour swept the island that a Canadian Air Force pilot had been washed up on a local beach. Liv and her brother 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 a real adventure... That’s the sort of thing I remember about Ireland.

She says the ‘wonderful, warm’ memories of her time in Ireland have always remained with her.

‘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. You know, I really loved Ireland, and I hope to be able to be buried there one day along with my siblings.’

nicola.byrne@mailonsunday.ie