You know, they ask me questions. Just an example: ‘What do you wear to bed? A pajama top? The bottoms of the pajamas? A nightgown?’ So I said, ‘Chanel No. 5,’ because it’s the truth… And yet, I don’t want to say ‘nude.’ But it’s the truth!
— Marilyn Monroe
The name Coco Chanel is synonymous with fashion and haute couture. The enduring brand name has survived and thrived long after the passing of its namesake. Chanel has been regarded by some as the greatest fashion designer who ever lived, she is certainly one of the most infamous. Her name has endured, not only on clothing, but also jewellery, handbags and of course perfume. Her magnum opus, Chanel No. 5, is one of the most popular and best-selling fragrances of all-time. Coco was a powerful and ambitious businesswoman and a pioneer in many ways. She was also widely regarded as a vicious and horrible person, a Nazi sympathiser, and eventually even a Nazi spy.
Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel had a troubled early life. She was born on 19 August 1883 in Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, France. Chanel was, literally, born in the poorhouse, specifically the Sisters of Providence charity hospital. Her mother, Eugenie Jeanne Devolle, worked in the poorhouse as a laundrywoman, and her father, Albert Chanel, was a travelling street vendor. The level of poverty that Gabrielle was born into should not be underplayed, and in fact played a large part in shaping her character throughout her life.
The French commune into which Chanel was born was very similar to a municipality in America. Saumur was a self-governed and somewhat isolated town tucked snugly between the Loire and Thouet rivers and surrounded by vineyards. The commune is located near the famous Champagne wine region and was well known for its sparkling wines. The Saumur area has been settled for thousands of years in one form or another. The ornate skyline of the town includes the impressive Chateau de Saumur castle that was constructed as a stronghold to protect the region from the advancing Normans in the tenth century. The chateau was sacked and later rebuilt by King Henry II. The town later served as a state prison under the rule of Napoleon and is famous for being the base of operations for the French military riding academy, and for its wine. During the Second World War, the German forces advanced on the town in an attempt to head-off the newly landed Allied forces in Normandy; the town was badly damaged from bombings and the German Panzer tanks rumbling through the area. Saumur would be awarded the Croix de Guerre after the war in tribute to the resistance and patriotism demonstrated by the townspeople in the face of great danger.
Saumur may have been an ornate and beautiful area, but the reality of life was very different for those in the lower classes. The sweeping poor laws of the previous century had produced exploitative and harsh workhouses, also known as poorhouses, in an effort to provide accommodation and provisions for the poor. The workhouse wasn’t a pleasant place for a child to grow-up. If you weren’t a highborn individual, then you could look forward to a life of poverty and hard work. The able-bodied women were put to work doing a variety of domestic jobs like sewing, cleaning, cooking, gardening or laundry. Gabrielle’s mother worked as a laundrywoman for the charity hospital run by the Sisters of Providence.
Life in the poorhouse was a difficult one. The toilet facilities in the workhouses were used by well over one hundred inmates and would also often include a communal chamber pot. The men and women were kept separate to avoid indiscretions. The children would also often be housed separately, at least when it came to sleeping quarters, and were subject to bed sharing to save space. The pre-set diet in the workhouse consisted primarily of bread, gruel and cheese. If you were lucky you might get a small serving of meat up to twice a week. The set restrictions could provide, for example, a meagre supper that included 5oz of bread and 1.5oz of cheese for an adult woman. The children in the workhouse were typically afforded the same diet as an adult woman, as long as they were over the age of 9; if you were under 9 it was up to the discretion of the staff. Meals were eaten in a large communal hall that often included the reading of biblical texts out loud to remind the inmates of the gratitude that they should be feeling for the charity that was being bestowed upon them.
Chanel would find herself in an orphanage by the time she was 12 years old. Her mother had died of bronchitis and her father had sent her and her two sisters away to live at the convent of Aubazine, where she would remain until the age of 18. Her time with the nuns in the convent would provide her with the groundwork that would come to build her entire empire – and change her fate forever – the ability to sew. This loss at a young age and lack of familial attachment would help mould her into an independent person who had little conflict putting her own needs first.
Coco Chanel faced a special amount of difficulty as a woman in French society. We all know that life was far more difficult for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the role of a woman in French culture was especially bleak, especially if you had any ambitions outside of marriage and motherhood. French women wouldn’t even gain their right to vote until the tail end of the Second World War, the first election that allowed women to vote in France was on 29 April 1945. It was only under the Provincial French Committee of National Liberation, headed by now legendary General Charles de Gaulle, that the right was provided to the women of France. French society has been isolationist over the years and the rights and roles of women in politics and society alike have grown at a slower pace than similarly developed nations. Germany, by contrast, has allowed women to vote since 1918, and America since 1920. The suffragette movement encountered a great deal of difficulty in piercing the thick, misogynistic cloud that loomed over French culture.
It wasn’t uncommon in French culture at the time for married men to live a nomadic and unreliable lifestyle, often travelling for work and leaving their families back at home. The duties of caring for the children, the home, and often even working on the side to help support the family, would fall upon the shoulders of the woman. Life in France was so laced with misogyny that it wasn’t until 1965 that a married woman could obtain the right to work without her husband’s consent. In the case of Gabrielle Chanel, her mother was an unmarried woman who lived with Gabrielle and her four siblings in a workhouse. A paradox of Victorian France is that an unmarried woman would be granted more rights than a married one. A single woman could own property and pay her own taxes to the state; she had more advantages and opportunities than a married woman, though even then they were limited by society. Albert did eventually marry Chanel’s mother, but only after her family paid him to do so.
When Chanel’s mother died, the reality faced by the children was bleak, at best. A girl of only 12, Gabrielle was at a tender age to lose her mother. The existence she had faced with her mother alive was destined to be difficult enough, but to lose her had to be devastating to her young psyche. This was likely only compounded by the actions of her father, Albert. A travelling street vendor wasn’t about to take on the task of raising five children. Gabrielle’s brothers were given to a peasant family and she, along with her two sisters, were brought to the convent in Aubazine by their father and abandoned. It was this harsh and painful action that would shape Gabrielle and her future, changing her fate forever.
The only hope that Gabrielle had to become the designer and woman that she truly wanted to be was to remain free, and to remain free in France she would have to stay single. This fact presented her with a new problem: it wasn’t easy for a woman to gain funding or support for opening her own business, so she would have to rely on private funding.
Gabrielle eventually began a small singing career in French nightclubs, where she went by the moniker ‘Coco’. There is a lot of misinformation out there about the life of Coco Chanel, most of which was spread by Coco herself. Over time, she was found to have provided several conflicting stories about her childhood and early life to various reporters and friends. For example, she once told editor-in-chief of Marie-Claire, Marcel Haedrich, that the origins of her nickname were from her father. ‘My father used to call me ‘Little Coco’ until something better should come along. He didn’t like ‘Gabrielle’ at all; it hadn’t been his choice.’ In an interview with The Atlantic however, Gabrielle claimed that her nickname was a shortened version of the French term coquette, which refers to a kept woman, or a woman of loose morals. Although, it has been noted that during her time as a singer in the La Rotunde club in Vichy she sang the songs ‘Ko Ko Ri Ko’ and ‘Who’s seen Coco in the Trocadero?’
Coco wasn’t shy about her sexuality and took many lovers throughout her lifetime. The life of a cabaret singer wasn’t exactly the culmination of a dream for Coco and she soon found herself a kept woman, the coquette lover of Etienne Balsan, a handsome young French socialite and the son of wealthy industrialists providing uniforms to the military. Chanel was just one of Balsan’s mistresses, but this wasn’t an uncommon part of French upper crust society.
Balsan would assist Chanel in opening her first boutique selling hats and dresses, a venture to keep her occupied while he was away tending to other interests. Balsan also introduced Chanel to Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, who would soon become another of Chanel’s lovers. Coming from a financially troubled background, Chanel was intoxicated by what the cultural tradition of being a mistress could provide her with. The entire affair was often treated more like a business transaction than a passionate love affair, a stipulation that fit Chanel’s personality quite well. Coco could quite possibly have lived out her life in comfort jumping from lover to lover, but she had her own ideas about her journey. Coco would use the financial benefits of her relationships to launch her own fashion empire.
In 1910 Chanel opened her very first boutique at 21 Rue Cambon in Paris, designing lavish hats. The simple elegance of her aesthetic soon swept through Paris. Chanel moved on to opening more boutique-style stores, including one in Deauville in 1913. There she introduced her line of sportswear, something that would revolutionise how women dressed and create an entire genre of clothing that is more popular today than ever. In 1915 Chanel made the biggest move of her career up to that point: banking on the reputation she had built over the previous five years, she opened her first couture House in Biarritz followed by the now famous Chanel Fashion House at 31 Rue Cambon in Paris in 1918.
On 5 May 1921, Chanel made possibly her biggest lasting mark on the world: she introduced the fragrance Chanel No5. The scent was created by Ernest Beaux and was given its name simply because it was the fifth fragrance presented to Chanel. Coco would unveil other fragrances in her lifetime, but none so timeless as Chanel No. 5. The purpose of the fragrance was to create a unique scent to epitomise the flapper and the revolutionary spirit of the 1920s.
The 1920s was a time of change and revolution, especially in the United States. The post-war decade began with the prohibition of alcohol and women finally being given the right to vote, a right that had been granted to women over the age of 30 two years earlier in England (the right to vote was finally granted to all women aged 21 and over in 1928). It is now a well-known fact that the act of prohibition didn’t stop people drinking alcohol; in fact it simply gave rise to organised crime. The United States was littered with seedy nightclubs and speakeasies run by questionable types that would offer alcohol on the sly. These establishments became a huge part of culture throughout the 1920s, especially for the younger crowd. Along with these clubs came the new and hip sound of Jazz music; coupled with a burgeoning fashion scene and rapid economic growth, the decade grew into what we refer to now as the Roaring Twenties.
The movement of women’s fashion throughout the 1920s was towards dropping the often restrictive and punishing corsets and petticoats of past centuries in favour of a comfortable fashion; a trend that would change not only fashion, but also the way women were perceived in culture. The first major clothing revolution that Coco Chanel would mastermind could be referred to as ‘La Garconne’, which is French for ‘Boyish’. This would be used to describe what is known in America as the ‘Flapper’ fashion movement, a style that would come to define the look of the period. During the mid-1920s Coco unveiled one of her most enduring fashion contributions: the little black dress. Being responsible for some of these wildly successful fashion revolutions would be enough of a résumé to keep the Chanel name in the history books, but Coco was never one to rest on her laurels.
In 1924, Coco wanted to expand the customer base for her Chanel No. 5 fragrance, but a move that grand required some serious financing. The Parfums Chanel corporate entity was created with backing from the well-to-do, Jewish, Wertheimer family. I note that they were a Jewish family for reasons that will become integral later in this chapter. The deal wasn’t even slightly in Chanel’s benefit, giving a seventy per cent stake in the company to the Wertheimers and only ten per cent of the stock to Coco for the licensing of her name. The remaining twenty per cent was awarded to Theophile Bader, who was instrumental in brokering the deal. The entire experience left Coco Chanel bitter.
Chanel would find more glamour in her life when she was called out to Hollywood to design for the stars in 1931, at the direct invitation of famed silver-screen studio head, Samuel Goldwyn. Quickly becoming a fashion legend and a legitimate member of the ‘in’ crowd, Coco revelled in her newfound American fame. She befriended various posh celebrities of the era such as Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and artist Pablo Picasso. Chanel would reach the peak of her fame and reputation in the 1930s, and by 1935 she was running five boutiques on Rue Cambon in Paris and was employing over 4,000 workers.
When the Second World War reached Paris, Chanel actually closed four of her boutiques, leaving many women out of work. A number of her biographers suggest that this move was done in retaliation to a labour dispute she had had with her workers a few years before, and that the opportunity to put them out of work was a vindictive action. The shop at 31 Rue Cambon remained open, often frequented by American soldiers looking to obtain gifts to send to their sweethearts back home. Little did these brave men know that the head of the House of Chanel was working for the enemy.
It is often echoed in biographies and articles that Coco Chanel was a horrible woman, a monster even; a sentiment that has been presented time and again from various sources. There is no doubt that her association with the Nazis was heinous, but this reputation came long before those revelations began to become public over a decade ago. One has to wonder how much of Coco’s poor reputation has to do with her being savvy and a strong businesswoman who took no prisoners and would not accept defeat? Would a man be given the same labels, or would he be labelled ‘industrious’ and ‘strong’? Her beginnings, born into a workhouse and abandoned in her early adolescence, made Chanel strong and determined. It is certainly a strength that should be admired, even if her actions shouldn’t always have been.
It was during the Nazi occupation of Paris that Coco Chanel would embark on a path that was to leave her name forever tarnished. It was in the early years of the Second World War that Hitler set his sights on the spoils and glamour of France. The German forces, complete with planes and tanks, rolled into France in May of 1940. The Fall of France was a brief affair; the French forces were defeated and surrendered in just six weeks. It was a humbling and even humiliating experience for the French; after all, they boasted the second most powerful military in Europe at the time. The reputation for military excellence came for the French during the First World War.
Once France had fallen, the French signed a surrender armistice with Germany that, in simplified form, split France into an occupied and an unoccupied zone. The northern part of France, including Paris, would be occupied by the Nazi regime. The Nazi occupying forces would set up a puppet government, referred to as the Vichy regime. This anti-Semitic French governing system was established to control the region more easily. Vichy was an area in France that, in the pre-war era, was a holiday destination known for its spas and refreshing water. The Nazis also moved into Vichy, along with the new French government officials. There was a serious need for space, so they moved into the various hotels in the city, kicking out the tourists. The head of the Vichy regime was French First World War hero Marshal Phillipe Pétain. The aged war hero would soon fall prey to the influence and menace of the Nazi propaganda machine.
On Thursday, 24 October 1940, French President Pétain and his Vice President Pierre Laval, met with Adolf Hitler in the isolated commune of Montoire. Hitler came to the meeting with Dr Paul Schmidt, his translator, and his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The aim of Pétain was to negotiate the armistice with Germany and end their mutual hostilities for the good of his country. His actions that day, and the infamous photograph of him shaking hands with Adolf Hitler, would call his loyalty to France into question in the coming years and he is sometimes regarded as a collaborator. In reality, by working with the Nazis instead of against them, he was doing what he believed to be right. He agreed to peace, but refused to join the Nazi war machine. On 30 October 1940, Pétain addressed the French people in a speech titled ‘Cette Collaboration diot être sincère’, which revealed to the people that he had met with Hitler and had every intention of working with the Nazis and meeting their terms.
President Pétain had the trust of the French people, but his speech left them confused and uncertain about what was happening. The French expected more resistance and instead they got compromise. There was a certain level of resistance and the desire to resist the Nazi regime by the French people, but there was very little that the average citizen could actually do. The best that most could manage was the silent resistance of keeping their lives as normal as possible and refusing to acknowledge or accept the Nazi occupation of France, a move that has come under heavy criticism over the years. Silence of resistance, or silence of complacency? On the other hand, resistance could easily mean death.
Adolf Hitler travelled to Paris only once during the war, with Albert Speer his Minister of Armaments and War Production, and entourage of various other Nazis. The Fuhrer visited the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Carrousel as a tourist on 28 June 1940. Hitler may not have remained in Paris, or even France, but the Nazi soldiers did. They occupied the streets of Paris with a menacing and foreboding presence.
On 20 June 1942 the Nazis began to require every Jew in France to sew a patch of the Star of David, whether they were French or foreign. If you were not wearing the star and were suspected to be a Jewish man on the streets, you could be stopped and questioned and even suffer the indignity of being forced to pull your pants down to prove the point, to extreme humiliation and embarrassment. It is an ancient tradition for Jewish males to be circumcised, a practice not commonly seen at the time in Europe. The Jews in France were eventually rounded-up and deported to concentration camps. The single largest round up of Jewish people during the occupation of France took place on 16 July 1942; approximately 15,000 Jews, many of whom were women and children, were rounded up by the French police and placed in a sport’s stadium for a week without food, water or sanitation. A good number of people died from thirst and malnutrition. The Jews from this roundup were eventually transferred to Auchwitz, never to be seen or heard from again.
The deal that brokered Parfums Chanel left Coco bitter and her ego bruised, not to mention her pocketbook. The company was a goldmine from which she was unable to adequately profit. Chanel lamented her decision, ’I signed something in 1924. I let myself be swindled.’ Those around Chanel advised her that all was well with the profits that she was enjoying, but Chanel was convinced that she was being taken for a fool. She didn’t care to take into account the amount of financial investment that it took to bring Chanel No.5 into the worldwide marketplace. Chanel would hire attorney Rene de Chambrun, a suspected Nazi collaborator, to begin various lawsuits against the Wertheimers in 1930. Over the years her various suits were wildly unsuccessful and it wasn’t until the Nazi occupation of France that she would get her first viable opportunity. The desire to gain control of the company bearing her namesake, and a relatively loose moral fibre, instigated Chanel to take advantage of the Nazi aryanisation of all Jewish-owned businesses.
The Nazi party had clearly laid out their intentions in their original twenty-five-point ideology over two decades before Chanel would get involved with the party. The intention of full segregation of Jews from their Aryan society was well underway in 1941, and had been since the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935. It took less than a year for two thirds of all Jewish-owned businesses in Germany to be transferred to non-Jewish Germans at a price that was well below the market value. Also, all Jewish managers and employees were fired. The ability for anyone of Jewish descent to make a living was effectively removed from Germany – and for any region that the Nazis would conquer. This would eventually include France.
When France fell in May and June of 1940, it was an enormous blow to the collective psyche of the European people who still had hope of resisting the dark shadow being cast by Hitler. The imagery of Hitler and the Nazis rolling into Paris and gleefully enjoying the sights, like the Eiffel Tower, are still to this day a vivid and haunting snapshot into what could have easily been the fate of the rest of Europe, and perhaps the world. Once France had fallen to the Nazis, it took Chanel only a year to devise a plan that would live in infamy.
On 5 May 1941 Coco Chanel wrote the following in a letter to the Nazi party, stating her case for the return of Parfums Chanel to her full ownership:
Parfums Chanel is still the property of Jews … and has been legally ‘abandoned’ by the owners. I have an indisputable right of priority. The profits that I have received from my creations since the foundation of this business…are disproportionate.
There is little doubt that the plan would have worked just the way she had wanted, but Chanel hadn’t accounted for the planning and cunning of the wealthy. It turned out that the Jewish man who owned that controlling stake in Parfums Chanel, Pierre Wertheimer, had foreseen the Nazi movement across Europe and had fled to New York to avoid the inevitable persecution. It was his actions prior to fleeing that Chanel did not anticipate. Wertheimer transferred the ownership of Parfums Chanel over to Felix Amiot before he left. Amiot was a French businessman without a drop of Jewish blood in his family line. This move is likely all that kept the company out of the clutches of Chanel during the war. Amiot turned the company back over to Wertheimer’s control once the war was over.
The 1924 contract to gain Parfums Chanel was again an issue when Coco had the nerve to bring the case up again, this time post-war in a court of law.
When Adolf Hitler became the German Chancellor in 1933, the rise to power for the Nazi leader was soon in full swing and he would soon make a carefully crafted move to full dictatorship. The regime of the Third Reich involved many branches, from the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) to the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the German secret police, Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo). These were the well-known divisions of the Nazis, but there were several departments, including a propaganda wing called Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and the Abwehr. The Abwehr was a secret German military intelligence organisation that had been established in 1920. In the post-First World War era, Germany wasn’t allowed to engage in any espionage, thanks to the Treaty of Versailles, an agreement that would also levy harsh restrictions on the country.
When Hitler took power he gained control of the Abwehr and in 1938 he organised the branch into a more effective intelligence-gathering unit. It was Joseph Goebbels himself, the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, who would appoint Abwehr spy Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage to the position of ‘special attaché’ to the German Embassy in Paris in 1933. The position that Dincklage held should not be underestimated. His German Embassy position provided him with the extremely convenient and effective veil of diplomatic immunity to work and plot while in France. His actions didn’t fall beneath the notice of the French intelligence community. Records reveal that they had been watching Dincklage since 1919. The French knew full well that he was a German Abwehr agent and even that his agent identification code was F-8680.
Once Dincklage got his attaché position he was able to move into a wealthy area of Paris and could be seen sporting around town in his flashy grey Chrysler roadster. Even his live-in maid, Lucie Braun, was a Nazi agent. The primary purpose of having the Baron as the attaché was to allow him the ability to gather intelligence effectively by planting employees in various key places, like factories and various government agencies. In 1934 the Abwehr agents were directed by the Nazi hierarchy to work more closely with the Gestapo to organise and execute espionage. It was, in fact, the very first Nazi cell in France.
Chanel had moved to a gorgeous suite in the famed Hotel Ritz, Paris. The high ceilings and ornate but elegant style made it the place to be if you had means. To this day, the Ritz has a famed reputation for its lavish atmosphere and unique culinary experience. Cesar Ritz opened the hotel bearing his name right on the place Vendome, a square that sits at the start of the Rue de la Paix, a fashionable shopping district. Ritz promised that his hotel would offer ‘all the refinements that a Prince might hope to find in his own private residence’. It’s said that his own investors complimented Cesar on his hotel at the opening, proclaiming: ‘Kings and Princes will be envious of you, Ritz. You’re going to teach the world how one should live.’ The move to the Ritz was no small hallmark in the life of Chanel, a woman who came from meagre beginnings. Her apartment there was, literally, the lap of luxury and high society.
During this time she was seeing designer Paul Iribe, who worked with Vogue magazine doing illustrations and design. The relationship between Iribe and Chanel started in 1931. Iribe, like all good artists, had his muse. The two would collaborate on a provocative magazine, titled Le Témoin, Iribe as illustrator and Chanel as financier. Le Témoin was well known as a purveyor of anti-Semitism and aggressive nationalism. The heroine of the illustrations within was Marianne, a symbol of French liberty. Iribe clearly modelled Marianne after Chanel herself. Chanel was deeply in love with Iribe and the two looked likely to wed, but in 1935, during a rousing game of tennis, Iribe collapsed and died in front of Chanel. She was devastated by the loss. Chanel mourned, but continued to move forward with her work, unaware that the world was about to be plunged into war.
Chanel and the French authorities were well aware of Dincklage’s Nazi connections and his work as an agent of espionage. During the prewar era his dealings were revealed by French counter-intelligence agents and were published in the newspaper Vendémiaire. There was no denying knowledge of his exploits, so when Chanel embarked upon a relationship with the Baron, she knew full well who she was getting into bed with. The moment that Coco and Hans met is not known; Coco would tell officials after the war that she had known him for decades, while others place their meeting sometime in the 1930s. Regardless of the truth, by the time the Nazis had taken France, the Hotel Ritz where Chanel resided had become a reserved place for senior Nazi officials. Chanel was one of the few foreigners who was allowed to remain.
Paris had fallen and refugees had fled to the South. There was Nazi propaganda at every street corner, signs and posters served as an ominous reminder to citizens that obedience to the new occupying forces would be in their best interest. Chanel was 57 when she and Dincklage became lovers in 1940. Hans was a cultured, pleasant and handsome man and a great conquest for Chanel in the newly occupied Paris. It was Dincklage who would facilitate all of the Nazi dealings that Chanel would have during the war. It is assumed that it must have been her connection with Dincklage that allowed Chanel to remain at the Ritz, where only a chosen few non-Germans were permitted to remain in residence. Only a handful of known Nazi collaborators and the wife of the hotel founder were allowed to stay, along with Coco Chanel. The times would soon become hard for French citizens, with many families facing starvation. All the while, the German officials, including Dincklage and Chanel, would dine lavishly in the well-guarded confines of the Ritz. In much the same way that the eight-man band continued to play their cheerful songs for the aristocracy while the RMS Titanic sunk around them, the high society of Paris continued on their typical merry way, while Europe came crashing down under the pressures of wartime.
Coco Chanel may not have been regarded as the kindest person in the world and she was certainly a savvy opportunist to take advantage of the Nazi mandates, but that’s a far cry from making her a Nazi sympathiser, and certainly far away from any evidence that she was a Nazi spy. There had been whispers and rumours for decades about Chanel’s shady dealings throughout the Second World War, and certainly many suspected her involvement, but it wasn’t until recently that actual documented proof began to emerge when declassified French intelligence documents were discovered. These documents detailed not only an involvement with the Nazis, but her ascension into actual Nazi spy and the special secret mission that was crafted especially for her.
In 2016, Historians poring over hundreds of boxes of declassified government documents that had been provided to the French Defence Ministry’s archives back in 1999, discovered documents that proved the French secret services had suspicions about the extent of Chanel’s Nazi connections. These documents, now available to the public (but only in person), reveal a file on Coco Chanel that French intelligence had amongst their files on various celebrities whom they suspected of being Nazi sympathisers. One such document, from 1944, states that: ‘A source from Madrid informs us that Madame Chanel, in 1942–1943, was the mistress and agent of Baron Gunther Von Dincklage. Dincklage was the attaché to the German Embassy in Paris in 1935. He worked as a propagandist and was a suspected agent’ (translated from the original French).
A French television documentary titled L’Ombre D’un Doute - Paris and Les Artistes sous l’Occupation, which aired in late 2014 on France 3, provided further evidence as to the extent of Chanel’s involvement with the Nazi regime. Chanel was so involved with the Nazis that she wasn’t just dating a spy – she was one herself. Coco went by the code name ‘Westminster’, which was a reference to her previous relationship with the Duke of Westminster. Her Abwehr involvement was so deep that she was even assigned an agent number, F-7124, according to an official Nazi record. The records of this information were also uncovered in the archives at the French Ministry of Defence.
The idea that Coco Chanel was a Nazi sympathiser, and even a Nazi spy, has only surfaced in recent years, thanks to the declassified French intelligence documents. Coco was, quite literally, sleeping with the enemy. There is an assumption to be made that when someone aligned themselves with the Nazis, they were automatically an anti-Semite. It is easy to jump to that conclusion, but in the case of Coco Chanel I found it difficult to find any evidence that she harboured any particular ill will towards Jews. Coco Chanel may indeed have hated the Jews, and certainly many of her biographers assert this as a fact, but I am reluctant to label anyone without actual proof – or at least a direct quote or two. Obviously, she was no fan of the Jewish family who financed her Parfums Chanel Company, but beyond that I could find no quotes from Chanel to corroborate her being anti-Semitic. Chanel was a cunning opportunist through and through and her work with the Nazis may have been more about the opportunities and advancement it could provide her with over any political or social agenda.
Chanel was the subject of a covert Nazi mission in 1943 by the name of Modellhut (‘model hat’). This mission was planned for some time and apparently involved Chanel first travelling to Germany to have a personal meeting with infamous Nazi Heinrich Himmler to plan the details of the mission. We may not be privy to all of the duties that Chanel might have filled as an agent to the Nazis, but we do know about this one key mission, which took place in Madrid (as referenced in the document mentioned above). She travelled to Madrid in 1943 with Hans, with the mission of using her past acquaintanceship with Winston Churchill to persuade him to a ceasefire with Germany through a personal letter, with the hopes of ending the aggressions between England and Germany. In a flurry of arrogance, Chanel was convinced that Churchill would listen to her as a voice of reason. Churchill didn’t see it the same way and the deal was ignored.
Chanel was sent on this rather odd mission, because the reality was that Hitler didn’t have a mind to continue using his resources in a war with England, but would rather prefer they concede and allow the Nazis to further pursue their intended target: Stalin and the Soviet Union. Reportedly, Hitler even sent his number two, Rudolf Hess, into Britain in 1941 with an offer of peace. Churchill likely refused these ploys for a number of reasons, partly because he knew Hitler wasn’t to be trusted and there were no guarantees that the sights of the Nazis wouldn’t simply be turned right back on England when they were done with the Soviets.
The documentary series also claims that the post-war records about the involvement of Coco Chanel, and other French celebrities, with the Nazis was scrubbed from existence to preserve the pride of the French resistance and keep from demoralising the public and further tarnishing the spirit of the French people.
Once the Second World War finally came to a close and the Axis powers were defeated, it was time to rebuild Europe, mourn the losses and hold those still alive accountable for their vast and devastating war crimes. The Nuremberg trials were the world’s answer to justice and retribution for the Nazis and their cohorts. Throughout 1945 and 1946 the military tribunals were charged with prosecuting twenty-four members of the remaining Third Reich leadership. One person that was missing from any trials was, of course, Coco Chanel. Well, of course she was missing if the documents that detail her partnership with the Nazis were only recently uncovered, you say? Unfortunately, those documents were classified by the French. The French government took measures to erase the history of Chanel’s involvement with the German occupying forces in Paris.
French women who slept with, had relationships with, or were even so much as friendly with German soldiers were accused of ‘collaboration horizontale’. In 1944 approximately 35,000 women had their heads shaved by hoards of male French citizens. They were utterly humiliated, stripped naked, and sometimes even had swastikas painted on their bodies. A fate that Coco Chanel craftily avoided. The irony is that many German women suffered the same fate when they cavorted with the French troops as they invaded the Rhineland in 1923. The Nazi party would also make the shaving of women’s heads a public punishment for being involved with a non-Aryan. These outbursts of public shaming and humiliation weren’t condoned by everyone and many found them to be disgusting displays of misplaced anger or jealousy. The sad reality for many women during the occupation of France is that the only way for many of them to care for their children, or themselves, with their husbands away at war was to have a liaison with a German soldier.
This ill treatment would not be the fate of Coco Chanel. The natural assumption might be that someone who was so much in the public eye would be subjected to the same, if not much worse, treatment as any other woman who had openly cavorted with a member of the Third Reich. In reality, the worst that Coco Chanel got was a few days of minor inconvenience.
It was August of 1944 and the allied troops were approaching Paris; the region was about to be completely freed from Nazi control. Chanel didn’t remain in Paris during the allied liberation. According to her former maid, Germaine, Chanel got a call from someone passing on a secret message from the Duke of Westminster. The Duke was warning Chanel to get out of France urgently. In a matter of hours Coco was fleeing to Lausanne, Switzerland. There has been talk that Winston Churchill was responsible for shielding Chanel from much of the post-war fervour, while other sources suggest that her connections within the royal family may have had an impact in protecting certain members of the Windsor family’s Nazi collaborations.
Chanel didn’t face a judge or jury until 1946, when Judge Serre and his team put together documents that tied Chanel and her codename of ‘Westminster’ to the Nazis. They were unable to find any documented proof of information, or tangible advantages that Chanel had actually achieved for the Nazi party, so they were unable to issue an immediate warrant for her arrest. They did, however, issue a bench warrant for her to appear and explain herself and her extensive involvement and connections with the Germans. Judge Roger Serre issued a warrant on 16 April 1946, demanding that the police and the French border patrols bring her in to answer for the claims made by Baron Vaufreland when he was being interrogated. Chanel wouldn’t appear in court for years, and not in front of Judge Serre.
Chanel finally answered the call a few years later to explain her actions during the war and about her connection to known Nazi conspirator and French traitor Baron Louis de Vaufreland. It turns out that in some of her travels she was paired with the Baron. Vaufreland bore the tag ‘V-Mann’ in his Abwehr files, which indicated that he had the trust of the Gestapo. The job that Vaufreland undertook was primarily recruitment of men and women who could be convinced or coerced into becoming spies for the Nazis. Apparently, Chanel would travel along with Vaufreland, in order to help conceal his actions. Vaufreland faced trial on 12 July 1949 for crimes against the French people by aiding the enemy during wartime. Coco Chanel was brought to testify during the trial and while she admitted to knowing Vaufreland, she downplayed their association and denied any wrong-doing. The prosecuting attorney, fixated on Vaufreland rather than Chanel, didn’t press her very hard during her testimony. She then returned to her safe haven in Switzerland, while Vaufreland was found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison.
Biographer Hal Vaughn speculated in his book, Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, that Chanel might have paid off a former Nazi after the war. According to Vaughn, when former Nazi SS head of foreign intelligence, Walter Schellenberg, was looking to release his memoirs, and in an effort to suppress the book, Chanel paid him and his family off. Schellenberg, of course, had intimate knowledge of Chanel’s involvement with the Nazis.
Coco Chanel had the luxury of living out the rest of her life in freedom, having never been truly taken to task for her actions during the war. She remained successful and outspoken, giving several interviews over the years that would contradict each other about various events in her life. On 10 January 1971, Chanel died in the Hotel Ritz, the lavish home she enjoyed during the Nazi occupation of Paris. She was 87 years old.
When Hal Vaughn’s salacious book, Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, outright accused Coco of being a Nazi spy, the Chanel fashion house decided to reply in a press release. A representative for the fashion house said the following:
What’s certain is that she had a relationship with a German aristocrat during the War. Clearly it wasn’t the best period to have a love story with a German even if Baron von Dincklage was English by his mother and she (Chanel) knew him before the War.
On the subject of Coco Chanel being perceived as an anti-Semite, the House of Chanel has said the following:
She would hardly have formed a relationship with the family of the owners or counted Jewish people among her close friends and professional partners such as the Rothschild family, the photographer Irving Penn or the well-known French writer Joseph Kessel had these really been her views.