HItler Car to be Displayed in Nepal Palace Museum

Officials said a 1939 Mercedes Benz presented by the Nazi leader to King Tribhuvan, Gyanendra's grandfather, is now rusting at Nepal's main Narayanhiti palace grounds.

It has lain there for more than three years after an engineering college in Kathmandu, which was using it to train mechanics, said it did not have enough money and spare parts to restore the antique car.

But now efforts are being made to display the car in the palace, which the government is turning into a museum.

Earlier, Govinda Prasad Kusum, a senior bureaucrat preparing an inventory of the property and other valuables of Gyanendra, which will be in possession of the government, said the vintage car should be displayed at the museum. "The car will be a major attraction there," he said.

The car was manually carried by scores of laborers for several days from Nepal's southern plains to Kathmandu in 1940, when the mountainous country had no roads.

Tribhuvan used the car when the Kathmandu valley had no other motor transport.

But after his death in the 1950s, the car gathered dust in the premises of the Thapathali Engineering Campus which used it as a model to train the mechanics there.

Its hood and doors are coming off, the inside of the bonnet is rusting and seats are torn, an official said.