Coco Chanel 'was a Nazi agent during Second World War'
Coco Chanel acted as a numbered Nazi agent during the Second World War, carrying out several spy and recruitment missions, a new biography claims.
Chanel was feted the world over as a pioneering fashion icon who changed the way women dressed and thought about themselves.
Her life has been the subject of countless biographies and films, which have charted her extraordinary career but also her darker side as a Nazi sympathiser and collaborator.
However, according to Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War, the creator of the mythical Little Black Dress was more than this: she was a numbered Nazi agent working for the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence agency.
After sifting through European and American archives, author Hal Vaughan, a Paris-based American journalist, found the celebrated designer had an Abwehr label: Agent F-7124. She also had a code name: Westminster, after her sometime lover with whom she spent weeks salmon fishing in his estate before the war.
Critics have long questioned Chanel's links to the Nazis; she spent most of the war staying at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, sharing close quarters with Nazi general officers, agents, and spies, including Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels.
It is well documented she took as a lover the German officer Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, some 13 years her junior, allowing her to pass freely among restricted areas. When questioned on their relationship she famously told Cecil Beaton: "Really, sir, a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover."
But previous works have depicted her more as an amoral opportunist and shrewd businesswoman than an active collaborator, while Von Dincklage, known by his friends as Spatz – the German for sparrow – has come across as a handsome but feckless mondain, more bent on enjoying the high life that recruiting spies.
Paris American author Hal Vaughan's book, out yesterday in the US, claims not only that Chanel was "fiercely anti-Semitic" even before 1939 but carried out missions on behalf of the Abwehr to Madrid and Berlin during the war, with von Dincklage, some on behalf of SS General Walter Schellenberg, Himmler's right-hand man.
"While French Resistance fighters were shooting Germans in the summer of 1941, Chanel was recruited as an agent by the Abwehr," he writes.
She travelled to Spain with French traitor and trusted German agent Baron Louis de Vaufreland, whose job was to "identify men and women who could be recruited, or coerced, into spying for Nazi Germany.
"Chanel, who knew Sir Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador to Spain, via her relations with the Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, was there to provide cover for Vaufreland's work," the book claims.
He also cites a British secret intelligence report documenting what Count Joseph von Ledebur-Wicheln, an Abwehr agent and defector, told MI6 agents in 1944. In the file, Ledebur discussed how Chanel and Baron von Dincklage travelled to bombed-out Berlin in 1943 to offer Chanel's services as an agent to Heinrich Himmler.
Von Dincklage, meanwhile, is described as a dangerous "Nazi spy master", Abwehr agent F- 8680, who "ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, who honoured him during the war.
The book adds weight to reports that Winston Churchill personally intervened to spare Chanel – a friend from before the war – arrest and trial, despite the fact she was on French resistance "death rosters" as a collaborator. She instead fled to Switzerland, only to return in 1954 to resurrect her reputation and reinvented the House of Chanel.
Chanel, who first learned how to be a seamstress at a Catholic orphanage, was never charged with any wrongdoing and died in 1971.
She is one of numerous esteemed French artists who collaborated with the Nazis – including Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and Edith Piaf.
Coco Chanel: profile of the pioneering French designer
Coco Chanel, born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in 1883, was a pioneering French designer who changed the whole way in which women dressed and thought about themselves.
author and statesman André Malraux said that "from this century in France only three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel."
Her key creations were a belted oversized sweater, the woollen Chanel Suit and knee length skirt, costume jewellery, the quilted handbag and her trademark Little Black Dress – originally strapless and backless.
After her mother died, Chanel was sent to the orphanage in a Catholic monastery, where she learned the trade of a seamstress.
She left at 18, becoming a cabaret singer, which is where she earned the nickname "Coco".
In the First World War, Chanel became the mistress of a rich military officer, and then the wealthy English Industrialist Captain Arthur Edward 'Boy' Capel – whose death in a car crash devastated her.
Notorious Nazi collaborators or sympathisers
Lord Haw-Haw, the Mitford sisters, Marshal Philippe Pétain, Maurice Papon.
1. William Joyce, nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw.
Joyce was an American-born fascist politician who broadcast Nazi propaganda to Britain during the Second World War. He was hanged for treason by the British as a result of his wartime activities, even though he had renounced his British nationality and become a naturalised German. He went to the gallows unrepentant.
2. The Mitford sisters.
Unity Valkyrie Mitford, was famous for her adulation of and friendship with Adolf Hitler. She shot herself in the head days after Britain declared war on Germany, survived but died of meningitis in 1948.
Diana Mitford, who died in 2003, left her aristocrat and writer husband Bryan Walter Guinness in 1933 for British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. She was interned in Holloway Prison during the Second World War and never renounced her belief in Fascism.
3. Vidkun Quisling
Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian politician, seized power on 9 April 1940 in a Nazi-backed coup d'etat that led to "quisling" becoming synonymous with "traitor". His regime contributed to the Final Solution. He was tried in Norway after the war and executed by firing squad on 24 October 1945.
4. Marshal Philippe Pétain.
Pétain, a celebrated First World War general for his heroism at Verdun, was head of the collaborationist Vichy France 1940 to 1944. After the war, he was sentenced to death for treason, but his former protégé Charles de Gaulle commuted this to life imprisonment. He died in prison on the Île d'Yeu in 1951, aged 95.
5. Maurice Papon
Maurice Papon led a prominent career as a French cabinet minister, but was convicted in 1998 of having helped the Nazis to deport Jews to concentration camps during the wartime occupation of France.
Papon's long overdue trial came after a 17 year investigation, and forced France once more to examine her conscience about the events of half a century before. It followed the release of an article in 1981 in Le Canard Enchaîné newspaper which published documents signed by Papon that show his responsibility in the deportation of 1,690 Bordeaux Jews to Drancy internment camp from 1942 to 1944. He was stripped of all his decorations after his conviction for crimes against humanity following a marathon trial.
He stood in the dock as the representative of the thousands of French men and women who had actively served the Vichy state, and of the millions who had quietly acceded to German rule and its consequences.
COCO BEFORE CHANEL
• Genre: Drama
• Director: Audrey Tautou, Benoit Poelvoorde, Marie Gillian, Alessandro Nivola, Emmanuelle Devos.
Coco Before Chanel is the story of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who began her life as headstrong orphan, and through an extraordinary journey became the legendary couturier who embodied the modern woman and became a timeless symbol of success, freedom and style. The film portrays the formative years of Chanel’s life, the years of Chanel spent discovering and inventing herself.
The confidence and the way Boy Capel looks at her comforts and reassures her. He knows that Chanel holds the future in her, and that the spirit of freedom in this woman embodies modernity. Boy Capel has grasped her remarkable nature, and he makes her understand that her difference is not a handicap, but that on the contrary, it will be her strength. It will trigger change for her destiny. What they have in common is precisely this modernity.
“I don’t understand how a woman can leave the house without fixing herself up a little – if only out of politeness. And then, you never know, maybe that’s the day she has a date with destiny. And it’s best to be as pretty as possible for destiny.”Coco Chanel
“A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.”Coco Chanel
CHANEL QUOTES
“I love luxury. And luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity. Vulgarity is the ugliest word in our language. I stay in the game to fight it.”Coco Chanel
“Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.”Coco Chanel
“Elegance is not the perogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.”Coco Chanel
“Look for the woman in the dress. If there is no woman, there is no dress.”Coco Chanel
“It is the unseen, unforgettable, ultimate accessory of fashion that heralds your arrival and prolongs your departure.” Coco Chanel
“Dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman.”Coco Chanel
“Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.”Coco Chanel
BOY ( The love of her life) Alessandro Nivola
“One can get used to ugliness, but never to negligence.”Coco Chanel
“Adornment, what a science! Beauty, what a weapon! Modesty, what elegance!”Coco Chanel
“There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.”Coco Chanel
“If a man speaks badly about all women, it usually means he was burned by one woman.”Coco Chanel
“I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one the things that women have is men.”Coco Chanel
“A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.”Coco Chanel
“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.”Coco Chanel
With her fashion designs, Coco Chanel encouraged elegance, individuality and emancipation for women.
http://www.sonyclassics.com/cocobeforechanel/
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