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.