Guilty...
Posted on 08/16/2011 10:21:18 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Legendary French designer Coco Chanel spied for the Nazis during the German occupation of France in World War II, according to a new book.
Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War, by Hal Vaughan, expands on long-standing evidence that the iconic designer had a double life and was the lover of a spy, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage.
"Sleeping with the Enemy pieces together how Coco Chanel became a German Intelligence operative; how and why she was enlisted in a number of spy missions; how she escaped arrest in France after the war," New York publishers Knopf said.
Vaughan's book reveals that not only was Chanel recruited to the Abwehr military intelligence organisation, but that von Dincklage was himself a "Nazi master spy".
He "ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, right hand of Hitler".
Chanel was also "fiercely" anti-Semitic, the book says, although at the time she would not have stood out among numerous other high-profile compatriots later seen as having collaborated during the 1940-44 occupation.
Chanel, an orphan who became a revolutionary fashion designer, moved to Switzerland after the war before returning to Paris to take up her career in fashion.
She was never charged with any wrongdoing and died in 1971.
That info will increase the sales of her over priced $1200 handbags now! The libs in NYC will love this!
I’m naturally skeptical about new claims made after someone dies and can no longer defend themselves, claims that there wasn’t even a peep about decades after their death. Just cause something is in a book doesn’t mean it’s true.
She was probably about 57 at the time.
That she was sleeping with a German (a crime for which many French women got their heads shaved after the Liberation) and wasn't exactly hostile to the Nazis has been well-known for many years. It's why she skipped to Switzerland in 1945 and didn't come back to France for nine years.
That she applied as an Aryan to be awarded the property of the Jewish family with which she'd gone into business to create her most profitable product, the perfume line, is documented. Her appeal said, in part
“Parfums Chanel “is still the property of Jews”…and had been legally “abandoned” by the owners. “I have,” she wrote, “an indisputable right of priority…the profits that I have received from my creations since the foundation of this business…are disproportionate…[and] you can help to repair in part the prejudices I have suffered in the course of these seventeen years.”Unfortunately for Coco, the family, seeing trouble ahead, had turned the business over to a gentile friend.
None of your post relates to the new claims from the book in question. Those are all things that have been known long ages before she died in 1971.
Is there good evidence for this new claim that she was a Nazi Abwehr intelligence operative doing many spy missions? Or is this just fun speculation from the author that generates sales?
I don’t know, I’ve just learned that just cause something is in a book doesn’t mean it is true. Maybe it is, I just don’t jump to believe it.
I have no idea if the claims in this book are true or not, but the previous story was that Coco Chanel was a “hero of the Resistance”. So many Frenchmen always claimed to be in the resistance that I always find that claim suspicious.
Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Abwehr Intel operative but like many Abwehr personnel he was working against Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s patrons in the Abwehr were involved in the July 20th plot to kill Hitler and arrest the SS.
Channel’s defenders have claimed she was a double agent.
If you listen to the French, everyone was in the resistance :-) In reality, French industry made weapons for the Nazis and was paid for it. French eagerly reported their Jewish neighbors. The story of Marcel Bloch (a.k.a. Dassault) is the most telling.
The French volunteers who served in the German Army and even Waffen-SS are rarely mentioned. A real example of the winners writing the history books.
Amazing - the woman most responsible for the popularity of the suntan, and thus Jersey Shore, was a Nazi spy. Before her it was considered a hallmark of peasantry and low breeding.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.