World War II Love Stories

by Gill Paul

  Looking after Spatz

  Following the end of hostilities, French public opinion was very much against Coco even after the House of Chanel released a statement saying, “Clearly it wasn’t the best period to have a love affair with a German even if Baron von Dincklage was English by his mother and she [Chanel] knew him before the War.” Coco staunchly denied all accusations of espionage or working for the Germans, but still decided it was wise to lay low for a while and so did not reopen the House of Chanel until 1954.

  With the defeat of Germany, months went by without any word from Spatz, and Coco was consumed with worry about him. When she met an American GI of German heritage named Hans Schillinger, the friend of a photographer with whom Chanel had worked, she gave him $10,000 and asked him to track down her lover and help him to reach his family’s estate in Schleswig-Holstein. He was to send her a postcard at the Ritz in Paris when he had any news.

  The timeless classic perfume, Chanel No. 5, got its name because five was Coco’s lucky number.

  It was not until 1946 that Coco received a postcard from Schillinger telling her that von Dincklage had been held in a prisoner-of-war camp. The American GI had managed to obtain the release of her lover, who had subsequently traveled to Hamburg. He wasn’t charged with any crimes at the Nuremberg Trials, despite claims from some that he had been a more significant spy than he ever let on to Coco. There was no possibility of getting von Dincklage into France, so she made arrangements for him to be conveyed to Lausanne in Switzerland, where they were finally reunited. His experiences had aged him, but he retained his elegant appearance and charming manners and they resumed their affair, socializing with international royalty at the Beau-Rivages Hotel on the lakefront in Lausanne and at hotels in St. Moritz, Klosters, and Davos.

  THE NUREMBERG TRIALS

  The leaders of Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and America had agreed early in the war that Germans who committed atrocities would be brought to justice, just as they were at the Leipzig Trials after World War I. On November 20, 1945, the International Military Tribunal opened its casebook in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg and, over the next year, 24 of Hitler’s main leaders were brought to trial and 12 were sentenced to death. These included Joachim von Ribbentrop, Martin Bormann and Hermann Göring, all close associates of Hitler, and Hans Frank, who as governor-general of Occupied Poland had been given the nickname, “Slayer of the Poles.” The trials were filmed and the newsreel shown in cinemas. For many Germans, this was the first they learned of the atrocities committed in concentration camps. The trials of less senior Nazis continued until 1949, with 142 out of 185 defendants found guilty and 24 sentenced to death.

  The defendants’ dock at the Nuremberg court. Nuremberg was thought of as the birthplace of the Nazi Party, so made a fitting location for the trials.

  Coco was recalled to Paris in 1949 to testify at the trial of Baron Louis de Vaufreland, a German agent who had accompanied her on the trip to Madrid, but she staunchly defended him and claimed to the judge that if necessary she could arrange a character reference from people high up in the British government. He was still convicted. Walter Schellenberg, the Abwehr intelligence chief, was found guilty at his Nuremberg trial and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. When he died in 1952, Coco paid for his funeral. There were rumors that they had been lovers, but there is no clear evidence of that.

  Questions would continue to be asked about Chanel’s relations with the Nazis in wartime, and her biographer and friend Marcel Haedrich said, “If one took seriously the few disclosures that Mademoiselle Chanel allowed herself to make about those black years of the occupation, one’s teeth would be set on edge.”

  Her affair with Spatz seems to have ended around 1950, although she continued to support him for some time afterward—until his next rich lover came along. By then she was well aware, if she hadn’t been before, that Spatz was a playboy who let himself be kept in the style to which he was accustomed by wealthy older women. No matter. They had been good company for each other throughout the war and had a genuine affection that transcended politics and nationality. Coco never had another serious love affair.

  Identity papers for Hans von Dincklage in April 1950, around the time his affair with Coco was tailing off.

  The relaunch of the House of Chanel fashion line stumbled in France, where Coco was still regarded as a collaborator. The full skirts of Dior’s New Look, launched in 1947, made her simple jackets and frocks seem old-fashioned, but she found favor among wealthy British and American clients and released several more successful collections before her death at the age of 87. Spatz continued to live on the goodwill of older women until his own death three years later.

  William &Kathleen Anderson

  Will and Kathleen’s wedding at Farnham parish church on August 16, 1938. Members of his company formed a guard of honor.

  During their honeymoon, they bicycled around the Isle of Skye.

  On May 1, 1940, after eating his breakfast, William Anderson bicycled down the road, waving goodbye to his pregnant wife Kathleen and his one-year-old son, Antony. It would be five years before they saw him again.

  Will and Kathleen’s mothers were friends long before their children met. The Anderson and Hunt families both moved to Farnham in Surrey around 1930 and began to socialize on a regular basis. Following a commission to the Royal Engineers in 1925, Will had gone to India in 1929 to work as an engineer, building roads and bridges in the mountainous region of the Northwest Frontier. His career path was determined by wherever they chose to send him and thus he was in India throughout the early 1930s, then Egypt in 1936, as part of the force protecting the Western Desert in case Mussolini’s troops tried to invade. In 1937, he was in Palestine, then back in India for a while, where his work in building a road through areas rife with tribal tension earned him an MBE and a Military Cross. Later that year, while home in Farnham on leave, he met Kathleen, the daughter of his parents’ friends, the Hunts, and it was clear to them both, more or less right away, that they were well matched.

  Their eldest son Antony’s christening in Farnham on September 20, 1939.

  The Hunts were a musical family and Kathleen had trained as a cellist at the Royal Academy, where she played under the famous conductor, Sir Henry Wood. Their courtship had to be arranged around his army commitments, so right from the start she had a good idea of the peripatetic lifestyle she could expect when married to such a man. But she was a capable young woman and ready to set up home with him wherever his career led. They married in August 1938 in Farnham parish church, and during the first year of their married life lived in Manchester, Ireland, and Edinburgh, (where their eldest son was born), then in Winterbourne Gunner in Wiltshire.

  …it was clear to them both, more or less right away, that they were well matched.

  When Will left for France with the Royal Engineers on May 1, 1940, Kathleen was in the early weeks of her second pregnancy and wrote in her diary, “Awful day has come. At 8 a.m., after breakfast together, Antony and I said Good-bye to Will.” No one knew how long the war would last, and of course she couldn’t be sure he would ever come back, but a strong religious faith helped her to cope with this uncertainty. She took Antony back to Farnham to live with her parents, praying every day for Will’s safe return.

  Captured near Dunkirk

  Will’s company was sent to the area southeast of Arras in France, near the border with Belgium, where they remained on May 10th when the Germans invaded Holland and Belgium and headed south. In the days that followed, between May 16 and 21, another Panzer division headed north through the Ardennes in Belgium until the British forces realized they were in imminent danger of being encircled and destroyed. A rapid retreat began toward the port of Dunkirk, where on the night of May 26th, the evacuation began. Will’s unit was charged with helping to resist the German Seventh Army, and to that end he got his men to push wagons together in a huge locomotive yard to the south of Arras, forming an anti-tank obstacle a m
ile long and three wagons deep that was extremely useful in holding up the advancing German Army. The unit was then ordered to defend a hill, Mont des Cats, near the Belgian border, before making their way to Dunkirk on foot. But one of Will’s men was wounded, slowing their retreat, and just 10 miles short of Dunkirk the party was surrounded and forced to surrender.

  Kathleen’s diary entry for May 1, 1940, the day Will left for France.

  Back home, the news from Dunkirk was reported in every news bulletin and Kathleen must have been frantic with worry, hoping against hope that her husband would get onto one of the ships that had sped across the Channel to rescue the troops. But he didn’t, and for seven weeks she didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. When she finally received a telegram from the War Office telling her that her husband was a prisoner of war (POW) in Laufen Castle on the other side of Germany, it came as something of a relief. At least now he wasn’t at risk of dying in battle. Still, she was anxious as her pregnancy advanced. Her worries increased in December when the newborn baby, a boy she named David, developed a condition brought on by stress during pregnancy. Called pyloric stenosis, it caused severe vomiting and required surgery to clear a blockage in the baby’s stomach.

  In spring 1941, the news came that Will had been part of an attempted escape from Laufen and, as the Germans considered him the ringleader, he was being transferred to Colditz, a castle in Saxony Germany said to be escape-proof. Through the auspices of the Red Cross, Kathleen had begun receiving letters from him.

  THE DUNKIRK EVACUATION

  Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay was charged with organizing the emergency evacuation of Dunkirk during the last week of May 1940. The beaches were very shallow, making it impossible to sail warships right up to the shore, so the call went out to boatyards around the British coast, asking for help. Over 700 “little ships,” including fishing boats, yachts, ferries, and pleasure cruisers, joined 220 British Navy warships in their dash across the Channel, so that, in the course of nine days between 27 May and 4 June, the motley fleet managed to rescue an astonishing 192,226 British and 139,997 French soldiers. The beaches were under constant bombardment from the Luftwaffe and 217 craft were sunk, among them 161 of the little ships, but enough of the British Army escaped to allow for a viable fighting force that would soon rise again.

  Dunkirk, May 1940: soldiers queue to get onto a boat that will take them to safety.

  Thinking of home: a photograph of Will taken in Laufen POW camp in late 1940 or early 1941.

  He wrote of his arrival: “I got here on Thursday after a journey lasting more than a day. This is rather an interesting camp! We have 200 French and Belgians, 80 Poles and 37 British officers, all a most excellent + enterprising lot.” Quite how enterprising they would prove to be, no one could have predicted at the time.

  A pantomime the men called “McLaddin” performed at Laufen, with Will as one of the cast (see below).

  The Spirit of Enterprise

  Kathleen and Will weren’t a sentimental couple; they were active, practical people who didn’t sit around feeling sorry for themselves. In Farnham, Kathleen felt responsible for the families of Will’s men who had been captured with him and, because they had a telephone at the house, she helped to share any information received and arrange get-togethers at which the wives could swap news. She also organized a packing center in which Red Cross parcels were prepared before being sent to prisoners of war—only the second such center in the country. Rationing was in force, but Kathleen saved whatever she could in the way of chocolate, butter, cigarettes, and clothing to send to the men, and she urged other POW wives to do the same. She didn’t have a lot of money because Will’s pay had been cut in half as soon as he was captured, the government assuming that his food and necessities would now be provided by his captors, but Kathleen and the other wives began raising funds in any way they could. She made regular home movies of his sons so that once he returned he would be able to see them at the ages he had missed.

  Meanwhile, in Colditz, Will was putting his engineering talents to good use. He became the resident tinsmith, making cooking utensils for the men and helping them to get the maximum amount of food cooked within the limited oven space they were granted. He shared a cell for a while with flying ace Douglas Bader and was escorted by guards down to a blacksmith’s shop in Colditz village to help with the repair of Bader’s artificial legs. Once an escape committee was formed, Will became the person who would create essential items seemingly out of thin air. He constructed a typewriter of sorts and used the Gothic handwriting he had learned at school to forge false identity papers for escapees. When they needed a camera to take photographs for those papers, he made one out of some old spectacles and a few bits of wood. And in the final days of the war, he helped some men who were building a glider in the attic by constructing a false wall to hide it from the Germans and an invisible trapdoor to allow access from below.

  David (second from left) and Antony (right) demonstrate their gas masks, along with their cousins. By September 1938, approximately 38 million gas masks had been distributed in Britain in case gas bombs were dropped during air raids.

  Will supported a number of escape attempts—on D-Day he was in solitary confinement after having been caught digging a tunnel under the dentist’s chair—but he didn’t try to escape himself, considering it “a young man’s game.” He was in his late thirties, while the men who escaped were mostly in their early twenties. As well as helping with escape attempts, he spent his time playing the oboe in the prison orchestra and painting watercolors of the camp and its surroundings. He was even allowed to send his paintings to Kathleen, and it was from one of these that she learned with delight that he had received a photo she’d sent of his sons, as she could see it painted into the view of his cell.

  From left to right, Antony, cousin Robert, and David help to promote fundraising concerts in Farnham.

  Back in Farnham, Kathleen organized exhibitions of prisoners’ art and also played at fundraising concerts. Her young sons paraded the streets wearing sandwich boards to promote forthcoming events, and her POW packing center grew and grew. Keeping busy must have helped—that and waiting for the two letters and two postcards a month that Will was allowed to send. There was only room for 20 lines in each and they were heavily censored. Will devised a secret code while in Laufen, sending her a clue in one letter that it took her six months to figure out—he was asking her to send maps of Yugoslavia. She forwarded the request to the intelligence service MI9, who agreed to take care of it. In fact, the POW wives preferred that their men didn’t try to escape, as they wanted them back alive.

  …on D-Day he was in solitary confinement after having been caught digging a tunnel…

  The End in Sight

  After 76 men escaped from Stalag Luft III camp in March 1944, Hitler was incensed and ordered that anyone escaping should be shot, and after D-Day in June 1944, conditions became harsher at Colditz. Rations were cut, fuel was in short supply, and there were no more food parcels from home. By early 1945, as the US Army advanced from the west and the Russians approached from the east, the situation had become especially volatile. It was feared that the German SS might decide to make a last stand in Colditz Castle and shoot all the prisoners to keep them from interfering. Alternatively, they worried that the Americans and Russians might shell Colditz, suspecting Germans to be holed up in there. Against this backdrop, the men worked hard on their glider, making its wings from bedsheets coated in boiled millet starch, wrapped around a wooden frame. If necessary, it was hoped two men could escape in that aircraft and somehow raise the alarm.

  In the final days of the war, however, the camp commandant was persuaded to turn over the interior of the castle to the men and on April16th, the US First Army arrived to liberate Colditz. Will was going home after five years’ absence. One of the last things he did before leaving Colditz was to take a Red Cross food parcel to the blacksmiths in the village. “I never had any problem with ordinary Germa
ns, who were in the same boat as we were,” he later explained.

  On the day they expected him back in Farnham, Will’s young sons planted Union Jacks in their sandpit in the driveway, but their father didn’t appear, having been delayed during the journey and his obligatory debriefing by the military authorities. At last Kathleen persuaded the boys to go to bed, and in the morning they woke up to find a man sitting at their breakfast table that Antony couldn’t remember and David had never met.

  This letter Will wrote from Laufen contained a coded message: “I am in a camp in Laufen Bavaria. I hope to be able to escape later on. Maps of Yugoslavia and Hungary would be useful.”

  ESCAPE ATTEMPTS FROM COLDITZ

  More than 20 tunnels were dug from Colditz Castle during the war, of which the longest one was dug from the wine cellar by the French over the course of nine months. The plan was for 200 prisoners to escape in one night, but in January 1942 the tunnel was discovered when less than seven feet short of completion. In another attempt, one very short man escaped in a Red Cross tea chest, while in another a man was sewn into an old mattress. Two Polish lieutenants tried to climb down a 118-foot wall using a rope made of bed sheets. Men disguised themselves as German officers, in one case as the camp electrician, and even as women. However, once they got out, they still had to make their way to the safety of a neutral country and most were recaptured. Estimates of the number of “home runs” (i.e., prisoners who made it all the way home) vary between 30 and 36. Airey Neave, who went on to become a politician in Margaret Thatcher’s shadow cabinet before being killed by an IRA car bomb in 1979, was one of the British officers who made it back safely.