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Hugh Lunghi (Read 7976 times)
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Hugh Lunghi
Mar 23rd, 2014, 10:52am
 
This obituary of Hugh Lunghi, long-serving producer and manager at Bush House, is taken from The Times:

Hugh Lunghi
Last updated at 7:45PM, March 21 2014


In July 1945, the Soviet sentries guarding the wreckage of the Fuhrer’s bunker in Berlin were surprised to be accosted by a dapper English officer speaking fluent Russian. Accordingly, they allowed Hugh Lunghi to become probably the first British soldier to enter the scene of the Nazi leadership’s last stand.

“It was damp and nasty and there was a lot of dirty clothing — a horrible, grim place which smelt terribly,” recalled Lunghi 60 years later. “Outside there was a heap of ashes and a pile of stuff and I said, what was that? One of the soldiers, a major, said: ‘Oh, that’s Hitler and his mistress.’ I don’t think he realised he wasn’t supposed to be telling me this.”

Lunghi had unwittingly been made privy to one of the great secrets of the time. Hitler’s whereabouts were unknown to the Western Powers, and the Soviets had not revealed that they knew he had committed suicide and that his body had been burned. Lunghi asked if he might take a souvenir and chose a volume from the encyclopaedia which Hitler had kept close at hand.

He was then permitted to visit the Reich Chancellery and retrieved chips of red marble from the Führer’s colossal desk, which had been smashed by Soviet troops. Iron Crosses yet to be awarded were strewn like autumn leaves across the floor, but what made a more lasting impression on him were files containing the photographs of children catalogued by the Germans before being dispatched to concentration camps.

Much of Lunghi’s subsequent career, however, was to be devoted to exposing the truth about another totalitarian regime, and one to which he had still more intimate access. Lunghi spoke Russian because his grandmother came from the Caucasus, which she had fled after the Revolution. In 1943, then a young artillery officer, he was sent to Moscow to be aide-de-camp and interpreter to head of the British Military Mission, Lieutenant-General Sir Giffard Martel.

Later that year, he was ordered to Tehran — which happened to be his birthplace, his father having been economic adviser at the Legation there — to attend the first of the conferences between the “Big Three”: Marshal Stalin, President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Lunghi assumed that he would be interpreting for Martel, but learnt that on occasion he would have to do so for Churchill himself, as well as for Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary.

Although Russia’s struggle with Germany had engendered much popular enthusiasm in Britain for “Uncle Joe”, the time that Lunghi had already spent in Moscow left him with few illusions about the true nature of the Soviet state. Those working for the Mission had their accommodation bugged and saw how the local press had belittled Britain’s contribution to the war effort. Nonetheless, the romantic in Lunghi was delighted by being offered at Tehran a window seat at the making of the postwar world. His first sight of Stalin proved a shock. “In pictures they made Stalin look a tall warrior type,” he recalled, “but he was very small in stature, about 5ft 2 or 3, and wore shoes with built-up heels. The other thing that struck me was that he never looked you in the eye.”

Although the mumbling Stalin was no match for Churchill as an orator — whose fondness for phrase-making presented Lunghi with considerable challenges as an interpreter — the Soviet leader revealed himself to be a master of his brief. The kindly image he projected to foreigners was also belied by an atmosphere of fear that prevailed in his own circle. When Marshal Voroshilov clumsily dropped the sword which Churchill had presented to Stalin to commemorate the victory at Stalingrad, Lunghi saw the soldier blench when transfixed by Stalin’s angry gaze.

In February 1945 Lunghi was sent ahead alone to prepare for the conference to be held near Yalta, in the Crimea — what Churchill called “the Riviera of Hades”. Although the atmosphere was superficially jolly, relations between the Allies were becoming more strained. Lunghi was especially critical of Roosevelt’s behaviour at the summit, believing that his obsession with gaining Soviet backing for the establishment of the United Nations led him to abandon Central Europe to communist domination.

By the time of the Potsdam conference in Berlin, in the summer of 1945, there was near-open hostility between the Soviets, the British and the Americans. Lunghi remembered how some light relief was provided by Harry Truman, who played the piano well and announced that he would rather have been a concert performer than President.

“While Truman was playing, Stalin came up and said: ‘I’m the only one without any talent, you see. The President is a concert pianist and the Prime Minister is a great artist — he paints — but I have no talent’.” Half-way through the conference, Clement Attlee’s victory in the general election meant that he replaced Churchill. Lunghi interpreted for the new Prime Minister, and noted with approval the tougher line that his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, took in negotiations over the fate of Poland.

After the war, Lunghi worked as Second Secretary at the Moscow Embassy. He interpreted for Field Marshal Montgomery in 1948 at crisis meetings at the Kremlin during the Berlin Blockade. The following year, he was posted back to the Foreign Office in London, and managed to smuggle home under his seat on the train the Laika hound which he had rescued from fierce shepherd dogs in Georgia.

His Russian fiancée, an opera singer, was not so fortunate. Although, as a favour by Stalin to Lunghi, she was given permission to leave the Soviet Union, she was then taken off the train bringing her to the West after first being poisoned by the KGB. Only many years later did Lunghi discover that she had subsequently been sent to Siberia.

Lunghi had a daughter by his wartime marriage to Helen Kaplan, which was dissolved. In 1950 he married Renée Banks. She died in 1992, and their three daughters survive him: the eldest, Xanthe, has been planning adviser to the NFU; Melissa has worked for many years for the NHS; and Diana is a retail fashion manager.

Hugh Albert Lunghi was born in 1920 and educated at Abingdon School, where he was head boy and captain of the rugby XV for three years. He then read Greats at Pembroke College, Oxford, before being commissioned in the Royal Artillery.

In 1954, he joined the BBC World Service. He became deputy head of current affairs commentaries and then head of the Central European department, which broadcast to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. During the crushing of the Prague Spring by Warsaw Pact forces in 1968, he was the BBC’s principal commentator for both radio and television audiences.

He continued his campaign for freedom of expression as director from 1980 of the Writers’ and Scholars’ Educational Trust, and as editor of its journal, Index on Censorship. He was able to revisit Russia in the 1990s, later lectured on Soviet affairs to universities, and was an invaluable source of information and wartime reminiscence for historians

Hugh Lunghi, interpreter and broadcaster, was born on August 3, 1920. He died on March 14, 2014, aged 93
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Re: Hugh Lunghi
Reply #1 - Mar 27th, 2014, 7:05am
 
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