The Frenchwoman built one of the biggest fashion houses in the world, but details about her involvement with the Nazis during World War II and how she avoided the fate of other traitors after the war was over have now been made public.
The world knows her for the little black dress, the pearls, the tweed suit and Chanel No. 5 – the perfume Marilyn Monroe wore in bed with nothing else. But Coco Chanel’s legacy hides a far darker past.
For decades stories have abounded about the French fashion queen’s collaboration with the Nazis, her affair with a Gestapo officer and the possibility she was a German spy.
The designer’s actions during the war are now the subject of a new book that makes use of recently declassified French Resistance papers and previously untold sources.
And it provides for the first time how she escaped from France to Switzerland while being hunted down by Resistance fighters for collaborators to lynch.
According to author Richard Wallace, she could only have traveled 340 miles using organized crime organizations.
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel is credited with elevating women from nothing with her boyish tailoring, pearls, and tweed suits as the “queen of chic.”
However, the reality was far from elegant, as Wallace claimed in his book Chanel’s War.
In June 1940, Chanel was already a global fashion icon with more than 4, 000 employees when the Germans marched into Paris. She sat down with the wealthy and powerful in Europe, praising Winston Churchill and Pablo Picasso.
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She was a mistress to some of the most powerful men of her generation, including the wealthy Duke of Westminster and the composer Igor Stravinsky.
She stayed in Paris while other elites pushed past the Nazis, staying at the Ritz, which would soon become Luftwaffe Headquarters.
Chanel’s studio on the Rue Cambon was shut down once the capital was overthrown, but her boutique remained open so that soldiers could purchase Chanel No. 5 for German sweethearts back home.
The 57-year-old designer, who was 33 years her junior, was soon on the arm of an attache at the German embassy, Baron Hans Guenther von Dincklage. Under Nazi rule, she lived an extravagant life, while other Parisians suffered hunger and other humiliations as a result of the romance.
Wallace thinks Chanel only learned what she had to when she was a 12-year-old who was sexless and sent to an orphanage as an infant.
She was “always the supreme survivor,” he claims. She consistently followed her instincts to ensure survival throughout her life. These actions were made without question, without regret, and without coercion. She only knew it through it, and it was successful.
Due to her relationship with von Dincklage, Chanel was able to obtain Andre Palasse, her nephew and heir, in Germany.
Others saw her cozying up to the Nazis as more than a means of surviving and guarding her family.
Chanel relied on her Nazi allies to recoup her per-fume business, which she had sold to Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, her Jewish partners, in 1924.
She petitioned German officials to help her reclaim a lucrative section of her empire as a result of “Aryanization” forcing Jews to abandon their businesses.
Before they fled to the US, she was unaware that the Wertheimers had temporarily given a Christian businessman ownership of Parfums Chanel in anticipation of upcoming restrictions on Jewish establishments. After the war, he gave them the business.
Chanel’s association with the Nazis cost a lot. She was asked to use her Allied connections to support the German cause in exchange for the release of her nephew and their attempts to overthrow her company.
She began working for the Abwehr as Agent F-7124, whose name she later took after her ex-lover.
She traveled to Madrid for two months in the middle of 1941 under the guise of business dealings, being ordered to obtain political information by winning British diplomats and dining in neutral Spain.
Wallace says: “There is a written record of a dinner party she hosted for British diplomat Brian Wallace and his wife and friends. “Parts of it, as minuted by the diplomat, are trifling amusements intended to titillate guests.
“But among all the dross of Chanel, there are also fascinating glimpses of how the Germans might be able to negotiate some sort of armistice with a nation they genuinely admire,” Chanel said. However, the British didn’t bite. After being exposed as a spy and fleeing back to Paris in 1944, she embarked on another mission with instructions to relay word to Churchill that senior officers were attempting to put an end to the war.
After a few months, Free French forces reclaimed Paris and discovered Chanel was in greater danger as a result of her involvement in the alleged collaborators’ capture.
In the streets of Germany, women who had slept with Germans were shot and their heads were shaved. According to Wallace, Chanel’s “greatest performance, her greatest escape, her greatest accomplishment” was avoiding a certain death when she left Paris for Switzerland.
She was briefly detained and questioned by the Resistance forces, but she was released shortly afterward, unlike other suspected traitors.
Later, Chanel revealed to her grand-niece that Churchill’s friend, Resistance leader Pierre Reverdy, was responsible for her release. Wallace believes it to be a former lover.
After returning home, Chanel packed her bags of cash and headed for Switzerland, where she had spent more than ten years.
With few cars, little fuel, and Resistance fighters pursuing collaborators, Wallace claims that her escape was not as simple as it could have seemed. He thinks that only organized crime could have allowed her to succeed.
According to Wallace, “organised crime meant that she had access to a quick, trustworthy vehicle with unlimited litres of priceless fuel, an escort armed with a proven blend of bravado and arrogance, and custom German/Resistance identity papers that could be used in any situation.”
Anyone who managed to navigate this bloody maelstrom of desperation to Swiss safety must have had a terrifying experience.
She made it, making her home in Saint Moritz, but continued to fear French fanatics would kill her.
She also vowed to return to haute couture in 1954, where she made a comeback at age 71 with a show featuring her beloved tweed suit, which would become one of her most recognizable pieces.
Due to her involvement in the wartime collaboration, the collection, which was funded by the loving Wertheimer family, received initially unfavorable reviews in France.
French Academy member Michel Deon, who was at the opening, wrote: “We watched the mannequins file by in icy silence.”
American women embraced the liberating suits and jackets, with Grace Kelly and Marlene Dietrich scheduling fittings.
Within a year, Chanel was once more a fashion powerhouse.
She is influencing everything, according to Life magazine a year later.
She is “bringing a revolution, more than a style,” according to 71.
Chanel was once more the undisputed queen of couture when she passed away in 1971 at the Ritz, where she had once wined and dined with Nazis. She passed away aged 87.
The House of Chanel is worth billions, and the double-C logo is now adorns everything from handbags to haute couture.
She is regarded as the greatest fashion designer of the century in recognition of her survival instincts, not for her treachery during the war.
- History Press published Richard Wallace’s book Chanel’s War on September 5.
Source: Mirror
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