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Was Coco Chanel a Nazi Agent?

Unlike any other figure in fashion history, Coco Chanel continues to hold a fascination decades after her death. It seems I am totally clueless about the woman behind the infamous brand after my discovery of this new book by Hal Vaughan, Sleeping with the Enemy.

Synopsis

The book reveals for the first time how Coco Chanel became a German Intelligence operative; how and why she enlisted in a number of spy missions; how she escaped arrest in France after the war, despite her activities being known to the Gaullist clandestine French intelligence; how she fled to Switzerland for a nine-year exile with her lover Dincklage. And how, despite the French court opening a case concerning Chanel’s espionage activities during the war, she was able to return to Paris at seventy and triumphantly resurrect and reinvent herself—and rebuild what has become, the iconic House of Chanel.

While researching reviews, I came across the New York Times review that caught my attention immediately. The review begins with:

“Gabrielle Chanel — better known as Coco — was a wretched human being. Anti-Semitic, homophobic, social climbing, opportunistic, ridiculously snobbish and given to sins of phrase-making like “If blonde, use blue perfume,” she was addicted to morphine and actively collaborated with the Germans during the Nazi occupation of Paris. And yet, her clean, modern, kinetic designs, which brought a high-society look to low-regarded fabrics, revolutionized women’s fashion, and to this day have kept her name synonymous with the most glorious notions of French taste and élan.”

So…not quite the image of Coco Chanel Ive always had. Clearly the NY Times author of the review (see the full review here) knows more about her story than I do. I remember catching a glympse of a documentary about Coco some years ago, a rags to riches story but Vaughan’s book sheds a totally different light than the documentary ever did.

In the book, Vaughan, a U.S. journalist and historian, cites newly declassified documents and French, American, German and English archives. The book’s central claim is that she was not merely a passive collaborator but actually an agent of the Abwehr German intelligence agency with her own code name — Westminster, after her former lover the Duke of Westminster — who conducted secret missions to Berlin and Madrid.

When it comes to Chanel’s espionage, the book’s smoking gun is a police document that identifies her as Agent F-7124. A copy of the document is included in the book, although it is so difficult to read, one wonders why it was not blown up larger.

Most “horizontal collaborators” were imprisoned or executed after the war ended. Many of them were paraded naked through the streets, their hair shaved into swastikas. But Chanel escaped unscathed, by many accounts because British Prime Minister Winston Churchill intervened on her behalf.

Even if the book’s central claim is true, what remains unclear is Chanel’s motivations. Vaughan makes the suggestion that she was “fiercely” anti-Semitic, but nowhere in the book does he provide irrefutable evidence to back it up.

Other than causing a minor stir on the Internet, the book doesn’t appear to have in any way slowed the $ 3-billion luxury brand or stopped women from carrying Chanel’s iconic quilted chain bags.