Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War

by Hal Vaughan

  In spite of repeated denials, rumors still persist here that the great Chanel will reopen her Paris house in the not too distant future. Be that as it may, she consented to design an evening gown to set off Van Cleef & Arpels’s newest pin—a great flower like star, or perhaps a comet, trailing a long supple fringe of jewels in lieu of a tail. The star has a tremendous diamond center. Its rays—or petals—are made of ruby, emerald, jade and large pearls, finished in pear-shaped precious pendants. Chanel designed a rich-colored background for this regal bijou. She uses it casually to attach flattering triple shoulder straps of ruby-red velvet ribbon with streamers that trail to the floor in back and thus counterbalance the effect of the heavy jewel fringe. The dress itself is of heavy crinkled crepe in the tone of darkest “emerald jade.” It is deeply décolleté and molds the figure in the inimitable Chanel manner. Glamorous finishing touches are a little head-dress of looped velvet ribbons and ruffled green suede gloves with ruby velvet ribbons tied in bows around the wrists to match their ribbon borders.

  IN AN ATMOSPHERE of false gaiety, soldiers came home on leave during the so-called Phoney War, and Parisians tried their best to amuse them. Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker, the American diva (who would take French citizenship in 1937), were belting out songs at the Casino de Paris. The racecourses at Auteuil were packed. One could enjoy the chatter and laughter at Maxim’s or the smoke-filled rooms of the Brasserie d’Alsace, where the best choucroute in Paris was still being served.

  Meanwhile, desperate refugees, mostly working-class Jews, continued fleeing Germany and Eastern Europe, hoping to find freedom in England, France, and the United States. Paris had now become a safe harbor for professionals and craftsmen who feared Hitler’s Germany and SS-run concentration camps. Some of those lucky enough to reach France found work as artisans and seamstresses at Parisian couturier houses. When war broke out, there were 120,000 refugees in France, the majority of them Jews.

  That first winter of war gave Parisians a real taste of deprivation amid dreadful cold spells. The average Parisian lived a somber life, ill-tempered and irked by food and fuel rationing. Fathers, young husbands, and brothers were away at war and some sixteen thousand children were sent to the country. The air-raid drills were a constant annoyance, and the occasional real firebombing of a factory in the Paris suburbs sounded a deadly note.

  For those lucky enough to be guests at the Ritz that winter of 1939–1940, the hotel remained an island of wartime luxury. Despite shortages of food and qualified staff, the Ritz was a mecca for the rich. Private chauffeurs had been mobilized. The wealthy had closed their Neuilly villas and moved into Ritz suites. Downstairs they could enjoy a smoke in the Psyche Salon, dinner in the Grill Room, and a drink at the Ritz bar. Chanel and her guests went on enjoying the Ritz’s fine cuisine. One luncheon menu offered pheasant soup, medallions of veal, and a baked apple washed down with a glass or two of a Premier Cru classé—Pauillac Château Latour 1929.

  Jean Cocteau and his partner Jean Marais lived in an apartment a short walk from the Ritz at Chanel’s expense. They dined frequently at Chanel’s table. The handsome Marais, not yet a French movie idol, had been called up to serve in the air force. He knowingly assured Chanel that a real war was out of the question. Marais ventured, drolly, that Hitler was bluffing; that the armor used to protect the German tanks that had crushed Poland was papier-mâché. The Phoney War would soon end. Hitler’s offer of peace was sincere. Marais was certain a peace deal was in the works.

  Parisian newspapers announced that Chanel and Cocteau would soon marry. The reports amused the openly homosexual Cocteau and Marais. Chanel was less amused but didn’t deny the stories.

  The Ritz was a convenient place to hold court. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as well as Arletty, the music hall actress and film comedienne, had suites there. The American business consultant Charles Bedaux and his wife, Fern—intimate friends of leading Nazis in Berlin—occupied three apartments near Chanel’s. The war didn’t stop the duke and duchess from giving a black-tie dinner, which was suspended temporarily because of an air-raid alert.

  Noël Coward, a frequent Ritz guest at the time, observed that when the air-raid sirens screeched along the hotel’s hallways, Chanel was forced to flee her luxury suite and to find shelter in the hotel’s basement. During one such alert, Coward spotted Chanel with her maids in tow, rushing for the cellar. According to Coward, her attendants, Germaine and Jeanne, trailed their boss into the shelter carrying her gas mask on a pillow. This bit of farce is probably one of Noël Coward’s piffles.

  MOST FRENCH FAMILIES knew nothing about the luxuries of the Ritz. They ate meat only twice a week. Even Parisian households in the better neighborhoods tightened their belts. Pastry stores were forced to close three days a week. Butter was restricted and meat in short supply, while liquor stores were forbidden to sell spirits but could offer wine and beer. Even the privileged who dined in restaurants had to get by with one meat course in a two-course meal. As winter ended, fuel for autos was rationed, and 5.5 million French farmers and farm workers were ordered to stay on the land and keep out of the cities. (No one explained how this was to be enforced.)

  It was worse for the average German. While Dr. Goebbels broadcasted in “suave radio tones” about Germany’s historic rights to lebensraum (literally: living space) and sang the praises of Hitler’s genius, the German Arbeiter (worker) plodded to his job in wooden-soled shoes, clutching black bread and margarine wrapped in newspaper. Tobacconists could sell only two cigars or ten cigarettes daily to male customers and none to females. The restaurants’ normal ration of beer was cut by 60 percent, while 40 percent of their wine reserves would go to the army. Later, dancing would be forbidden and “German Hausfrauen driven to desperation by the pleading of sallow, hungry children because the state had cut the spinach ration to one-half pound a person.”

  The Reich’s propaganda machine churned on. As Germany perfected its plans to overrun the Low Countries and France, Hitler urged peace negotiations. His pronouncements were carried in lively headlines in Paris newspapers. Paris-Soir, the popular Radio Cité, and the BBC all spoke of diplomacy at work. French men believed politicians would find some neat political compromise to end the war.

  For Parisians sipping chicory-laden coffee in their local cafe, there was a certainty that no matter what happened, Paris would be spared. They held an unshakable conviction that the devastating war losses of World War I had made another all-out war with Germany inconceivable. A million and a half men, one-tenth of metropolitan France’s male population, had been sacrificed in 1914–1918. Wasn’t the Great War the war to end all wars? Four million men had come home wounded: blind, limbless, with broken faces—Les Gueules Cassées. Could it be that across the Rhine the Germans had forgotten their dead and wounded? Had the horrors of World War I been blanked out?

  The French writer Jean Guéhenno, gravely wounded in 1915, thought, “I will never believe that people are made for war.” French men lived “a delicious illusion”—convinced that if the Germans did come again, they wouldn’t get across the Seine River as they had in 1914. They couldn’t possibly penetrate the impregnable defenses built since 1930 by André Maginot: a formidable cluster of reinforced concrete artillery positions, machine-gun pillboxes, and tank traps called the Maginot Line, where Chanel’s nephew André Palasse served. It had cost taxpayers 3 billion francs, and it had been constantly upgraded. It would stop Les Boches.

  Jean-Paul Sartre, who manned a post on the Maginot Line, believed, “There will be no fighting, that it will be a modern war, without massacres as modern painting is without subject, music without melody, physics without matter.” He spent his days on the Line sending weather balloons into the air and watching them float away through his army-issued binoculars. He wrote, “What they do with this information is their affair.” Everyone hoped that a quick, diplomatic settlement was on the way.

  The French military command lived in a fool’s paradise.

&n
bsp; A few men—Charles de Gaulle and his fellow officers—knew the “futuristic fortifications” were “foolish” and a “dangerous distraction,” and in the end they did prove a “pitiful irrelevance.” West of the Maginot defense line, the 400-kilometer border between France and Belgium was largely unprotected against Hitler’s coming blitzkrieg.

  The French and British staff officers couldn’t agree about the vulnerability of their line of defense in northern France. They argued over troop dispositions and strategy. When the Duke of Windsor visited French front-line positions, he was struck by the political feuds. The French generals, he reported to London, “were more actively hostile to each other than to the Germans.” Intelligence reports revealed the incessant quarrels among the French and British high commands and the weaknesses in France’s defense. A disaster was in the making. And Hitler was revising his plans of attack at that very moment.

  Winston Churchill visited Paris frequently that winter and spring of 1940 but never grasped how badly the war was being managed. More than once, he saw Chanel at the Ritz. The future prime minister of Britain had been beguiled by Coco since 1925, when the two had met often at the home of the Duke of Westminster and later at Bendor’s hunting parties in France and on the Côte d’Azur. The war had spoiled everything. The good times were now memories. Days when Churchill lingered on evenings in Chanel’s rooms, drank too much, and wept in Chanel’s arms were bygone memories.

  On his Paris visits Churchill wanted to know everything. After meeting Chanel, he would then interview Hans-Franz Elmiger, the Swiss manager of the Ritz, probing him about conditions in Paris, the attitude of Ritz employees, and the morale of Parisians. Did Churchill bring Chanel news of Bendor—now a powerful nuisance in wartime England, with his pro-German and anti-Semitic pronouncements? Did he assure Chanel that the Allies could defend France? Churchill could not believe otherwise. His love of France was too great to see her flaws. His experiences with the French officer corps—the valiant Frenchmen that he, the Prince of Wales, and Bendor had known twenty-five years earlier on the Western Front in World War I—made him believe France could not be defeated. Later—too late—he realized how the political intrigues in the French high command had rotted the will to win.

  CLARE BOOTHE LUCE prefaced her book Europe in the Spring with the words of an English wit: “Hitler and his cohorts may send death to me and you. For it’s just the sort of silly thing that silly man would do.” As the green shoots of poppies appeared in Flanders Field, Time magazine editors wrote: “Last week long-dreaded World War II was six months old … as spring breathed sweetly on Europe … as the first storks returned to Belfort … the wings of war rustled more and more ominously. Somewhere on the Rhine the Germans were reported massing pontoon bridges … the German people expect a vast Nazi offensive to begin soon.”

  They were off by four weeks. The Rhine offensive would have to wait. Hitler had a different surprise for Europe. In the first week of April 1940, Chanel must have been startled as other Parisians were with the news that the führer’s warships had bombarded Danish and Norwegian ports. German secret agents simultaneously triggered a Nazi putsch in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. King Haakon VII, the royal family, and the government fled to London. All of Norway and Denmark were occupied.

  In London, Neville Chamberlain resigned. Churchill was called to King George VI, the forty-five-year-old younger brother of the Duke of Windsor. Churchill reassured his king that Parliament would vote for him to direct Britain’s life-or-death struggle for as many years as it took.

  AS HITLER SWALLOWED Norway and Denmark, Parisians began packing. Ritz manager Elmiger vowed to stay open despite operating with only twenty-four employees, a quarter of the usual staff. The sisters Germaine and Jeanne, Chanel’s two chambermaids, decided it was time to get out of Paris. They abandoned their mistress for their home village, while Chanel went about trying to replace the chauffeur she had lost to the military.

  WHILE EUROPE HELD ITS BREATH, the handsome now forty-four-year-old Dincklage was at work in neutral Switzerland. He had fled there when Britain and France declared war on Germany. Posing as a businessman, Dincklage’s mission was to collect military intelligence on Swiss defenses. He was to advise the German high command in Berlin on whether the Swiss would fight if Germany attacked France. Dincklage wasn’t alone; he was backed up by his former spy chief, Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Alexander Waag, a veteran Abwehr intelligence group leader now stationed at the German Embassy in Bern. Driving a Fiat Topolino with French license plates, Dincklage first spent several weeks in Ruvigliana near Lugano in the Italian Ticino at the Villa Colinetta owned by Dr. Leonardo Dicken, an old acquaintance and retired German official. Dr. Dicken’s villa may have served as an early mail drop where Dincklage could receive correspondence. But French counterintelligence had already issued orders to its agents and to the various post and telegraph services that all communications from Maximiliane von Dincklage (Catsy had retained her married name) and from the baron’s new mistress, Hélène Dessoffy, be opened and monitored.

  In Switzerland, Dincklage must have learned that his former wife and Abwehr agent, Catsy, now age forty, and Dessoffy were under French surveillance. Dessoffy, the daughter of a high-ranking naval officer, had become Dincklage’s mistress and a friend to Catsy in the mid-1930s. With the coming of war, she had been interrogated by French counterespionage agents at her home near the French naval base at Toulon. Earlier, before war was declared, Dincklage and Hélène had been expelled from Tunisia for spying. They had been discovered by French counterintelligence trying to penetrate the French naval base at Bizerte. Dincklage had deserted Hélène to return to Berlin before beginning his espionage assignment in Switzerland.

  Edmonde Charles-Roux recalled how, just before the declaration of war, Hélène’s husband, Jacques, had been “devastated” to learn that his wife was to be tried for espionage. Indeed, with all mail from Germany being screened by French counterintelligence officers, Dincklage may have unwittingly caused the arrests of Hélène and Maximiliane by writing to the two women earlier from Berlin.

  Moving from one Swiss canton to another, Dincklage eluded detection until he checked into the Clinica di Viarnetto at Pregrassona, near Lugano, claiming he suffered from a nervous disease. (It was a classic ruse used by German agents “to avoid police control.”) His efforts to operate covertly failed. Neither Waag in Bern nor their Abwehr handlers in Berlin had counted on the efficiency of the Swiss intelligence apparatus, which was just as effective as the German Gestapo. It turned out that Dr. Dicken was suspected by Swiss counterintelligence of being the chief Gestapo agent in Lugano, and the Swiss had already tagged Dincklage as a spy in 1933—perhaps when he was stationed in Warsaw. Dincklage then moved to Davos and finally landed at the Hôtel de la Paix at Lausanne—somehow managing not to fill in a registration card. Within a few days, the local police were tipped off, and his presence at the hotel was transmitted to the senior Swiss intelligence officer in Lausanne, Colonel J. Jacquillard.

  A Swiss police officer now called on Dincklage at his hotel and took his diplomatic passport for examination. The document turned out to have been issued in Paris in 1935 and was valid until April 1940. The Swiss were now more than curious, which prompted the Bern headquarters of the Swiss intelligence service to open a formal investigation. When questioned later by Swiss officers, Dincklage was outraged. He told a Swiss police inspector named Decosterd that he had an English-born mother and had left France because he “wasn’t enthusiastic about returning to Germany.” The baron was furthermore so offended that he fumed to Decosterd, “You ought to investigate some of the clients at the bar of the Lausanne Palace Hôtel,” observing that they looked pretty suspicious.

  If anything was fishy, it was that Dincklage now kept company with women of “ill repute, addicted to morphine and suspected of spying for Germany.” What’s more, Swiss counterintelligence discovered that the suave former German diplomat had a Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS)
account with a substantial balance of 18,000 Swiss francs (about $63,000 in today’s money). When the Swiss contacted French sources, they learned that in France Dincklage had been a notorious womanizer who also had led clandestine operations in Spain and Tunisia and that he and Catsy ran an espionage network in France before and after their divorce. Dincklage used his good looks and charming personality to recruit French women to spy against targets on the Côte d’Azur. Hélène Dessoffy had been his mistress, courier, and agent. Later, the Swiss discovered that a forty-year-old German princess named Adele von Ratibor Corvey was, like Dr. Leonardo Dicken, receiving letters from France as a mail drop for Dincklage.

  Pushing ahead, Swiss authorities asked their French colleagues for more information and discovered that a Parisian court had issued an arrest warrant for the baron at the request of the French intelligence and police services: Dincklage was wanted for spying against France.

  Still, Bern, where the Swiss intelligence services directed operations, had no tangible and documented proof that Dincklage had broken Swiss law or committed espionage. Dincklage managed to let others do the dangerous work of receiving and transmitting documents to Berlin. He still held a valid German diplomatic passport—and at this crucial moment in German-Swiss relations, Bern had no desire to provoke an incident.

  Bern finally decided to politely ask him to leave the country. By November 1939, Dincklage had left his hotel and closed his UBS account. He somehow managed to move 18,000 Swiss francs out of the country, and then went skiing in Davos. Swiss counterintelligence finally discovered that Alexander Waag and Dincklage were running two agents for the Abwehr: Hans Riesser and his wife, Gilda Riesser (agent cover name 1001). Hans was arrested. When Swiss agents examined his German passport, they found the document didn’t bear the obligatory “J” for Jew. Since Riesser was indeed Jewish, the Swiss concluded he must have been an agent. He would spend the next four years in a Swiss prison. His wife, Gilda, managed to get across the Swiss border to France, where she would later serve the Abwehr.