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.