Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War

by Hal Vaughan

  By 1934 the Berlin Nazi machine issued orders to have Abwehr units work hand in hand with the Gestapo and the SS. Abwehr agents, like the Dincklages, were commanded to maintain close relations with all Nazi organizations involved in espionage and counterespionage. In a final order, demanding cooperation between Hitler’s police and intelligence services, Abwehr agents were told to recruit and train individuals who would collaborate with the Gestapo in espionage activities. As part of this consolidation, German citizens of the Reich living overseas were commanded by Berlin and local consulates to join Nazi cells. In Paris, Dincklage, now labeled by French police as “directing a German police service,” was also involved with the first Nazi cell in France. His group met every week at 9 p.m. at 53, boulevard Malesherbes. In 1934 the Dincklages’ maid, Lucie Braun, was listed as the 239th member of the Paris cell, among 441 members.

  The French military counterintelligence service (Deuxième Bureau) had by now accumulated a background file on Dincklage and his wife. The agency was informed of the couple’s living habits and operations in Paris and at Sanary-sur-Mer. “Dincklage’s wife, Maximiliane, [was] the daughter of ex-Colonel of German cavalry von Schoenebeck and Melanie Herz. The couple lived at 64, rue Pergolèse, rented for 18,000 Francs a month [the equivalent of $19,000 in 2010].” The report supplies endless detail: “Dincklage is traveling continually; his wife is often in Sanary at the villa La Petite Casa. In Paris the couple is visited at all hours of the day and night by Charles Coton and Georges Gaillard” as the Dincklages “continually seek out the company of French naval officers.”

  French authorities now decided to damage the Dincklage operations. Rather than outraging Hitler by expelling a German couple with diplomatic accreditation on grounds of espionage, French counterintelligence turned to the press. On November 27, 1934, Inter Press (a newswire service) issued a startling report about Dincklage and his underground network. The story was released about the same time Winston Churchill was warning the British Parliament about the “menace” of Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe air force. The Inter Press dispatch revealed how: “Baron von Dincklage, Hitler’s agent in Paris, has been replaced … he was denounced in his own embassy as a member of the Hitler secret police … now he is involved in special missions in Tunisia—then under French mandate. One of Dincklage’s close friends (Charles Coton) is an administrator of a French naval unit stationed at the French naval base at Bizerte, Tunisia. Coton comes frequently to Paris. On the 16–17 November [1934] Coton came to the Dincklage apartment with three suitcases which he claimed belonged to the Dincklage couple … Then a few days later the Vietnamese valet of the Dincklages’ friend Georges Gaillard came to the Dincklage apartment with a box of keys to open the suitcases; when the Dincklages returned to their apartment they took two of the suitcases away—[they may have then traveled to London].” It turned out that French official Pierre Gaillard was one of Maximiliane’s lovers. The report named other members of the Dincklage espionage network in France: Madame Christa von Bodenhausen (her lover was a French naval officer); German newsman Hanck; and Krug von Nidda, a notorious Nazi and later German ambassador at Vichy during the occupation. Ernest Dehnicks of the German Consulate General was also a Dincklage agent. Finally, the report confirmed “the German tourist office at 50, avenue de l’Opéra, Paris is suspected of acting against the national interest”—a French government euphemism for spying.

  IN 1934 Chanel moved into a suite at the Ritz with a wood-burning fireplace and an austere bedroom. The Ritz was synonymous with good taste, refinement, and comfort, and renowned for offering a fine menu of French haute cuisine. Chanel’s Ritz apartment overlooked the Place Vendôme, around the corner from the rue Cambon, where she created a four-room apartment above her workrooms. The space was decorated with objects and furniture she treasured: the Coromandel screens from Boy Capel, crystal chandeliers, Oriental tables, and a pair of bronze animals. From the Ritz’s back entrance Chanel could cross the street to her salon and apartment, which allowed her to avoid the despised Schiaparelli’s boutique on the Place Vendôme.

  Chanel was in love with a dark, handsome Basque: the exceptionally creative illustrator and designer Paul Iribe, her same age. Born Paul Iribarnegaray, Iribe had made a hit in Hollywood directing one film and as an art director for Cecil B. DeMille. In France he was the popular illustrator of a book of erotica based on Paul Poiret’s fashions. A writer and illustrator for Vogue, a designer of fabrics, furniture, and rugs, and an interior designer for wealthy clients, Iribe attracted Chanel with his provocative wit and multiple talents.

  Using Chanel’s money, Iribe revived a monthly newssheet, Le Témoin, and turned it into a violent ultranationalist weekly. According to one biographer, Iribe was an elitist bourgeois supercharged with an irrational fear of foreigners. Reading his issues of Le Témoin, one would think France was the eternal victim of some vast international conspiracy. The magazine was a timid echo of France’s Fascist and anti-Semitic press, publications that supported French storm troopers named the “hooded ones”—La Cagoule—and groups promoting law and order in Italy and Germany. Biographer Charles-Roux believed Chanel’s launching of Le Témoin with Iribe as editor and art director marked her transition from political indifference to a view of the future modeled on the opinions of Iribe—mixed in with ideas and prejudices absorbed during her peasant and Catholic upbringing. In the February 24, 1933, edition of the magazine, Iribe had the brass to draw Chanel as a martyred Marianne in her Phrygian bonnet—her naked body held by a collection of evil-looking men with obvious Jewish features. France, according to Iribe in Le Témoin, was suffering from a conspiracy managed by “enemies within” called “Samuel,” or “Levy,” the “alien” like Léon Blum, and “Judeo-Masonic Mafia,” the USSR, and “red rabbles.” His extreme political views aside, however, Iribe’s artwork in Le Témoin was breathtaking.

  No man before Iribe had raised Chanel’s political awareness, and she brought him into her professional life to share the power she had always guarded assiduously for herself. Chanel was once again “happy” and in love. Iribe had become her confidential agent, her “knight,” and Chanel asked him to work in conjunction with René de Chambrun on the Wertheimer case. Rumors of a marriage swirled about the city.

  In August 1935, Chanel and Iribe invited a houseful of guests to La Pausa. Photographs of the event show a glorious summer afternoon, one of those golden days on the Riviera when a light breeze from the hills above joined with the salt air of the Mediterranean to create an intoxicating atmosphere. Chanel’s guests that afternoon looked as if they had stepped out of a sketch printed in a fashion magazine featuring her summer modes: espadrilles, a French sailor’s horizontally striped T-shirt, and casual pants made of jersey fabrics—an idea borrowed from the Duke of Westminster’s crew on the Flying Cloud. Iribe, whom French writer Colette depicted as a “very interesting demon,” arrived at La Pausa from Paris.

  With Hitler in power, violent Nazi persecutions of Jews raged in Germany. In 1935 the anti-Semitic Paul Iribe, Chanel’s lover, published in Le Témoin this prostrate Marianne (representing France) with Chanel’s features. Hitler holds Chanel (searching for a heartbeat) as men and a woman with Jewish traits look on. The caption reads: “Wait, she still lives.” The publication, edited by Iribe, was financed by Chanel. (illustration credit 5.3)

  The next day—a splendid September afternoon—Chanel relaxed in the shadows of an ancient olive tree, its green leaves ruffled by a breeze. She watched Paul Iribe play an informal match on her tennis court, delighting in her lover’s athletic prowess. Her Great Dane, Gigot, lolled beside her. Suddenly, Chanel’s world came crashing down. Suddenly, Iribe collapsed on the court before her eyes, his face ashen. Later, horrified, she watched stretcher bearers carry his body away. Paul Iribe, another “man of her life” whom the gossip columnists were sure would wed Chanel, was dead. She was “devastated.”

  A long winter of grief followed. From that moment on and until the end of her life,
Chanel injected herself with a dose of morphine-based sedol before going to bed. “I need it to hold on,” she would say. As she had after Boy Capel’s death, she sank into a void, using the sedative to calm her nerves.

  Chanel’s grand-niece, Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie, remembers a song her aunt repeatedly sang in heavily accented English during one summer’s visit to La Pausa. The words were, “My baby has a heart of stone … not human, but she’s my own … To the day I die I’ll be loving my woman.” Madame Labrunie thought the sad poetry was a cameo of Chanel’s life.

  Coco had lost her drive and energy. Without Iribe, she had no emotional attachment; she was entering her years of discontent. She longed to get away from the Parisian carousel. In London, always a refuge, she attended the Royal Ascot annual race with Randolph Churchill. The London Daily Mail quoted her: “Your Queen succeeds in a very difficult task. In an age where successive bizarre and extravagant fashions—not always in perfect taste—are sweeping the world, she maintains a queenly grace and distinction which are conservative without being old-fashioned.”

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1934, Hitler’s campaign of terror seemed to know no end. In Austria, Nazis had murdered Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss; in Berlin and Bavaria, Hitler personally supervised the murder of Ernst Röhm’s Brown Shirt thugs—now his political opponents. To celebrate his gaining total power, Hitler’s organizers brought two hundred thousand party officials with twenty-one thousand flags to a packed Nuremberg Nazi rally. A frenzied crowd heard their führer shout, “We are strong and will get stronger.”

  That same year, Hitler turned his attention to the anti-Nazi, Swiss-educated, liberal king of Yugoslavia, Alexander—a staunch ally of France and a thorn in Hitler’s grand plan for Europe. In the summer of 1934, Dincklage traveled to Yugoslavia. He was tracked by the French Deuxième Bureau to the capital city of Belgrade, barely three months before a Bulgarian nationalist shot King Alexander dead as he landed at Marseille port to begin a state visit to France. French intelligence agents then revealed: “Dincklage … former attaché at German Embassy Paris was this summer in Yugoslavia for business.” Dincklage wrote his former Paris Embassy colleagues, “Business in Yugoslavia is tough like everywhere else.”

  Three months later, André François-Poncet, French ambassador to Berlin, wrote to Sir Eric Phipps at the British Embassy in Berlin: “The Germans are by no means as innocent in this assassination business as they would have us believe” and that Göring was somehow involved while he was visiting Belgrade.

  In March 1935, Hitler brushed aside the Versailles Treaty. Repudiating it two years later, he ordered compulsory military services—trebling the numerical strength of the German military machine. French intelligence services now received permission to strike at the growing German espionage and black propaganda operation, which was spreading false and deceiving information in France. Dincklage was singled out as the principal target.

  “Gestapo über alles” (Gestapo above all) were the words used for a dramatic headline in the September 4, 1935, issue of the Paris weekly Vendémiaire. The exposé (obviously the work of French counterintelligence) was spread over three columns. An additional long report followed in the September 11 issue of the paper. Both stories featured Dincklage’s work as a Gestapo agent (at the time, the French did not differentiate between Abwehr and Gestapo) and as a special attaché at the German Embassy. In five thousand words, Vendémiaire unmasked the work of Nazi and Gestapo agents in France. The editors revealed that Dincklage was a Gestapo officer somehow linked to the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and that he had visited the Berlin Gestapo in September 1934 and delivered to “a Gestapo officer named Diehls a list containing the addresses of German exiles in France.” Further, he had offered to provide the Nazis lists of former German Communists in France. Later, it was revealed that Rudolph Diehls was a close friend of Hermann Göring, who appointed him to a high Nazi post after he was dismissed as head of the Gestapo and replaced by Himmler.

  The newspaper story is a close copy of an October 1934 report authored by French Army Headquarters. It notes that Dincklage received 100,000 francs a month (equivalent to about $105,000 today) to finance “his corrupt activities.” Vendémiaire went on to document Dincklage’s movements as a German agent on special missions to the Côte d’Azur, in Paris, and in the Balkans. In a mission to Tunis, Dincklage employed dissident Muslims to launch a violent propaganda attack on the French colonial regime.

  As France was preparing for war with Germany, French authorities—most likely the Deuxième Bureau—allowed author Paul Allard to publish almost the same story as the one that appeared in the weekly Vendémiaire. Allard’s postwar book, How Hitler Spied on France, told how Goebbels’s propaganda agent in Paris, Dincklage, urged his Berlin masters to supply him with favorable anecdotes about the domestic life of the families of SS officers. Dincklage explained to his bosses that the stories could be placed in French publications sympathetic to the Nazis.

  DURING HITLER’S 1935 NUREMBERG RALLY, the Nazis enacted the Nuremberg Laws, a series of laws aimed at Jews. Overnight, Maximiliane von Dincklage, now considered a Jew under Nazi law, was deprived of her citizenship. It was the fulfillment of Nazi racial philosopher Alfred Rosenberg’s wish that Germany’s “master race,” which he labeled as a homogeneous Aryan-Nordic civilization, be protected against supposed “racial threats” from the “Jewish-Semitic race.” Among other things, the law prohibited marriage between Jews and Aryans. Dincklage must have known the decree was imminent. Three months earlier he had divorced his wife of fifteen years at Düsseldorf.

  The newly single Dincklage spent the summer near Toulon in the apartment of his English mistress and her sister. With the release of the Vendémiaire news articles, Dincklage hurriedly moved to London. There, in a temporary haven at a Mayfair Court apartment on Strasson Street, he wrote to the German ambassador in Paris. The letter makes a feeble attempt to get the ambassador to protest to French authorities about the publication of the Vendémiaire series. His appeal didn’t work, and the ambassador asked his aide-de-camp to reply to his former attaché. Here are excerpts from the exchange of letters:

  To the Honorable Ambassador,

  I have just now obtained from a French business … the Vendemiaire 4. Sept. 35. In my estimation, the author of the enclosed document … must certainly be paid by anti-German sources … The day before the assassination of the King of Yugoslavia [I was] in Tunis … [you] must write … the authorities that [the information is presented] is untrue and completely unfounded. I am currently in the process of building a … [illegible] and this announcement could be a disadvantage to me. I faithfully request that Herr Koester … [tell] the French authorities in a truthful manner [in order] to clarify the errors … Much of my work, my many trips to France, and … my time at the embassy … have produced … good results for Germany and France. I express my respect and high regard, Mr. Ambassador, and remain your loyal …

  [signed] Dincklage

  The German Embassy in Paris responded:

  Paris, the 13 September 1935

  Dear Mr. Dincklage,

  The Ambassador instructed me to thank you for your kind words. He doesn’t believe an intervention in the matter which you explained is currently [illegible]: the rumors that were spreading earlier have abated, and undertaking measures to correct the rumors, whether in Quai d’Orsay [location of the French Foreign Ministry] or among the local press, would only cause old legends to take on new meanings and concern to spread. However, should the rumors emerge again[,] the Ambassador will take the opportunity to raise the issue of your concerns with the local foreign office.

  With many greetings I am, Ever your loyal correspondent.

  [signed] Fühn

  PRIOR TO DINCKLAGE’S DEPARTURE for England, a 1935 secret Deuxième Bureau report revealed how his maid, a member of a Nazi cell in Paris, was now operating from the Dincklage base in Sanary-sur-Mer: “A woman whom Dincklage claims to be his secretary named Luc
ie Braun, also of the personnel of the German Embassy in Paris … [is] suspected of working against the national interest.” The bureau believed that prior to Dincklage’s departure for London, Lucie Braun lived near Toulon at Sanary where there was a large German community. The report adds that on February 9, 1935, Dincklage was visited by his seventy-two-year-old uncle William Kutter, a rear admiral of the German navy living at Darmstadt. Kutter arrived directly from Strasbourg (France) and remained in Sanary at La Petite Casa until the end of February 1935. The admiral was questioned at the Toulon rail station as to the reason for his visit. He told French agents he had come to Toulon as a tourist, but he did not reveal he was going to the Dincklage villa at Sanary.

  NEWLY REELECTED PRESIDENT Franklin Roosevelt now proclaimed American neutrality and appealed to Hitler and Mussolini to settle European problems amicably. Still, Winston Churchill found time to cable Chanel. On December 2, 1935, he wrote from London: “I fear I shall not be an evening in Paris when I pass through on the 10th of December, but I shall be returning towards the end of January, and look forward indeed to seeing you then. I will give you two or three days notice by telegram from Majorca where I propose to winter. How delightful to see you again. Herewith my debt.”

  There is no explanation of Churchill’s reference to “my debt.” However, it is doubtful that he ever went to Majorca that winter of 1935. In the coming months Churchill would become embroiled in the political fortunes of Great Britain. With the death of King George V of England, his son Edward, Churchill’s close friend, succeeded to the throne. Churchill would expend great political capital trying to protect his sovereign and close friend from the wrath of the British parliament, which opposed Edward’s plan to marry the American divorcée Mrs. Wallis Simpson.