Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War

by Hal Vaughan

  German Abwehr agent Count Joseph von Ledebur-Wicheln interviewed Dincklage in Paris about Dincklage’s plan to use Chanel in Madrid, Spain, to contact Winston Churchill via the British Embassy there. Ledebur is seen here after he defected to the British MI6 in Spain, 1944. (illustration credit 10.2)

  At the time Dincklage offered no other details of the proposed mission to Madrid and London. (He may have told Ledebur that the woman, Vera Bate Lombardi, was a member of the British royal family and a childhood friend of Winston Churchill and the Duke of Westminster.) Ledebur then went about gathering additional information on Dincklage and Chanel. He questioned Fern Bedaux, wife of the Nazi agent Charles Bedaux, who was well known to Ledebur. Fern had a suite at the Ritz on the same floor as Chanel. She told Ledebur that Coco was a drug addict who “every evening received Dincklage in her rooms.”

  Ledebur needed more information before giving Captain Pheiffer an opinion. He turned to Dincklage’s old Abwehr chief in France and Switzerland, Colonel Alexander Waag, who was still stationed in Paris. Ledebur learned from Waag that “Dincklage had been one of Waag’s Abwehr agents before the war and had run Abwehr spy networks on the Côte d’Azur and Toulon, where he lived with two beautiful English girls, the Joyce sisters—one of whom was Dincklage’s mistress.” (We know nothing else about the sisters.) According to Waag, “Dincklage was a marvelous professional agent who spoke English and French fluently and furnished a number of reports about French fortifications and warships at the Toulon French naval base. He (later) worked as a diplomat at the German embassy in Paris.”

  In 1938 Dincklage was forced to close down his espionage work in France “because he was burned by the French 2ème Bureau intelligence services. Dincklage then left for Switzerland, where he again worked under Colonel Waag running a German spy network there.”

  However, now (during the occupation) Waag said, “I couldn’t use Dincklage because he wanted too much money. He lacked a sense of purpose.” And in any case, “Dincklage was now directly working for the Abwehr foreign services in Berlin … under cover of being a purchasing officer for the German occupation purchasing organization in Paris.” Waag said that in Paris, “Dincklage was in contact with Major von Momm of the Berlin Abwehr.”

  Ledebur then consulted Abwehr archives. He learned “Dincklage had trouble with the Gestapo in 1940 apparently because his wife was half Jewish.” Finally Count Ledebur called on Dincklage “at a sumptuously and luxuriously furnished apartment on the avenue Foch.” There, Ledebur discovered Dincklage had a butler in uniform, golf clubs standing in the hall, and other luxuries that impressed the visitor. The apartment was obviously one that would be given only to a very senior Abwehr officer.

  During their conversation at Dincklage’s apartment, “Dincklage explained that a trip to Madrid offered many opportunities for Chanel to put her many British and American friends there on the [Abwehr] string.” When pressed for details, Dincklage urged Ledebur to meet Chanel. He added that “a first trip to Madrid was needed to develop the project.”

  Without having time to meet Chanel, Ledebur told Dincklage that Colonel Waag, his former boss, “opposed the Chanel trip to Madrid.” Ledebur then called Berlin to advise Captain Pheiffer, “I didn’t favor the Dincklage trip to Madrid. Pheiffer agreed.”

  For Ledebur, the case was closed. However, ironically many weeks later, he learned from one of his contacts in Paris, Comtesse Édith de Beaumont, that she had seen Dincklage at Hendaye, the French-Spanish border crossing:

  I [Ledebur] learned that at Hendaye in January 1944 Dincklage had a long conversation with the Gestapo chief [at] the border station … I was now intrigued. I knew Dincklage had hoped to obtain intelligence from the British and the Americans in Spain through Chanel’s international connections. I then asked German military intelligence sources if they had issued a visa to Chanel or to Dincklage. I also enquired from the German passport service, the Passerierschein Pruefstelle, how Chanel and Dincklage could have traveled to Madrid.

  A few days later I was told by Passerierschein Pruefstelle (safe conduct pass control station) that the couple must have traveled under assumed names.

  Ledebur may never have learned that Chanel’s passage to Madrid had been arranged by the German SS security services in Paris on the orders of Berlin. He may have never known that the Gestapo officer Dincklage met at Hendaye was SS general Schellenberg’s liaison officer in France, forty-nine-year-old SS captain Walter Kutschmann, the SS Border Police commissioner at Hendaye. (A secret postwar report prepared by the U.S. Political Advisor for Germany on Nazi war criminals tells how Kutschmann “had been selected by Schellenberg to assist Chanel in every way and to deliver a large sum of money to Mademoiselle Chanel in Madrid.”)

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME Dincklage met with Count Ledebur in Paris, members of Ribbentrop’s foreign office staff in Berlin were secretly seeking ways to open negotiations with Britain. Himmler was not the only Nazi looking for an escape route. Indeed, Ribbentrop and staff were also “fishing for lines to the Western allies, as well as the Soviet Union.” Simultaneously, Allen Dulles, OSS chief in Bern, Switzerland (and later first director of the CIA), and British agents were seeking meetings with reliable German sources. While in Turkey, Dincklage’s Abwehr boss, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and German ambassador Fritz von Papen “were receiving peace overtures from American sources in 1943.”

  In the months ahead, the game of negotiating his exit strategy through mediation would become an imperative for Himmler. He and his colleagues had no doubt that they would be tried for criminal behavior at war’s end if Germany had to accept unconditional surrender. Schellenberg was so concerned about Hitler’s sanity that he now risked talking about the outcome of the war with his psychiatrist friend, William Bitter, at the University of Berlin.

  Schellenberg was not alone in fearing that Germany was damned under Hitler. In 1943 a group of senior German Wehrmacht officers in Berlin and Paris—some connected with the Abwehr and led by Prince Claus von Stauffenberg—were hatching another plot among senior Wehrmacht officers to kill Hitler.

  BY THE LATE SUMMER or early fall of 1943 Dincklage had heard nothing more from his contacts at the Abwehr in Berlin. In Paris Chanel and Dincklage now convinced World War I comrade-in-arms and friend Major Theodor Momm, a member of the Nazi party and an officer of the Berlin Abwehr, to travel to Berlin and seek other avenues to offer Chanel’s services as a way of reaching the Duke of Westminster and other British nobles. Momm was to emphasize, as had Dincklage before him, that Chanel’s close relationship with the Duke of Westminster and her long-standing friendship with Winston Churchill could be used to communicate to the highest levels in London.

  Arriving in Berlin, Momm contacted German Foreign Office officials—but he failed to pique their interest. He then turned to an old friend, Dr. Walter Schieber, a Nazi state counselor and Reich SS-Brigadeführer. At the time Schieber was a senior advisor to Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer. With Schieber’s help Momm soon learned SS general Walter Schellenberg, Himmler’s intelligence chief, might be interested. In a preliminary meeting with Schellenberg, the SS general “urged that Chanel be brought to Berlin.” Dincklage immediately made preparations to travel to Berlin with Chanel.

  IN THE FALL OF 1943, a trip to Berlin was not arduous, though it might have been dangerous if the traveler were unlucky enough to be caught up in one of the frequent air raids staged by British bombers. Chanel and Dincklage had a choice: they could travel on the French-German railroad system or the regular German Alte Tante Ju (Old Aunt Ju) air service. (“Ju” stood for Junkers, the aircraft’s manufacturer.) The plane flew daily between Berlin’s Tempelhof airport and Paris’s Le Bourget—where Lindbergh had landed in May 1927 in his history-setting New York–to–Paris flight.

  A more comfortable route was by wagon-lit (sleeper) train from Paris’s Gare du Nord to Berlin’s Zoo Station—a service that ran daily. Chanel and party would leave Paris at 23:17 hours and arr
ive the next day in Berlin at 21:34, enjoying comfortable dining and sleeping facilities.

  At Berlin’s rail station, Schellenberg’s trusted SS officers would meet Chanel, flanked by SS orderlies on hand to carry baggage. The party would then be conveyed to a side exit on Berlin’s Jebensstrasse and shown to an SS limousine for a drive through the blacked-out streets of Berlin. The weather that fall and winter of 1943 was cold, the streets lined with snow banks. Chanel was certainly witness to how Berlin had been bombed out. Even the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church had been gutted by British incendiary bombs.

  The SS chauffeur would have taken the Ring Autobahn highway to reach the Berlin SS guesthouse at Wannsee, a lake resort in Berlin’s western district. The area had not been touched by air raids. (In case of a raid, there was a bombproof shelter a few meters from the guesthouse.) In January 1942, the Wannsee facility had been used by SS general Reinhard Heydrich to hold his infamous conference to coordinate the plan for the destruction of European Jews.

  Chanel was about to meet Himmler’s right-hand man and an SS general. She was entering the halls of Nazi power.

  A first meeting with Schellenberg would have taken place at Schellenberg’s offices at the Reich Main Security Office at Berkaer Strasse at the corner of Sulzaer Strasse. The building had been a nursing home for the Jewish community until it was seized by the SS in 1941.

  The story of the Chanel-Dincklage meeting with SS intelligence chief General Walter Schellenberg in Berlin is contained in a 1945 British Secret Service transcript of Schellenberg’s statements made during “harsh” interrogations lasting for months after he was arrested by the British. The sixty-page transcript reveals Schellenberg was ill and under stress: “I was finished after eight weeks in a lightless cell.” Still, a check of historical records confirms the information he provided his interrogators is largely accurate. However, the date of Chanel’s first visit with Schellenberg is recorded incorrectly. Chanel first met him in Berlin in December 1943 or January 1944—not in April, as stated in the transcript. The April date may refer to Chanel’s return visit to Berlin after the Madrid mission had failed.

  SS headquarters in Berlin where Chanel traveled, late 1943. Seen here, the building was once a Jewish hospice. Chanel, Dincklage, and Momm met at SS headquarters with SS general Walter Schellenberg when they arrived from Paris. (illustration credit 10.3)

  The following is what SS general Walter Schellenberg told his MI6 interrogators about Chanel’s first visit to his Berlin SS headquarters:

  In April 1944 Staatsrat Scheibe an SS Brigadefuhrer and Albert Speer’s right-hand man in the Nazi Ministry of War Production and one Rittmeister Momm told Schellenberg of the existence of a certain Frau Chanel, a French subject and proprietress of the noted perfume factory. This woman was referred to as a person who knew Churchill sufficiently to undertake political negotiations with him. [She was] an enemy of Russia and desirous of helping France and Germany, whose destinies she believed to be closely linked. Schellenberg urged that Chanel should be brought to Berlin, and she arrived in that city accompanied by a certain Herr Dincklage. (It is believed by Schellenberg that Dincklage may have had some working connection with the Abwehr and the SD but that he is unable to confirm this.)

  Schellenberg made Chanel’s acquaintance in the presence of Dincklage, Schieber, and Momm when it was agreed: a certain Frau Lombardi, a former British subject of good family then married to an Italian, should be released from an internment camp in Italy and sent to Madrid as an intermediary. Frau Lombardi was an old friend of Frau Chanel and had been interned with [her] husband for some political reasons connected with the latter and possibly [Pietro] Badoglio [then prime minister of Italy]. Lombardi’s task would be to hand over a letter written by Chanel to the British Embassy officials in Madrid for onward transmission to Churchill. [The letter referred to by Schellenberg has never been found.] Dincklage was to act as a link between Lombardi in Madrid, Chanel in Paris, and Schellenberg in Berlin. (Chanel’s mission to Madrid was given the code name Modellhut—German for model hat.)

  SS General Walter Schellenberg (center), Himmler’s chief of SS intelligence, and SS colleagues (date unknown). Late in 1943 Schellenberg met with Chanel, Dincklage, and Momm in Berlin and approved the Modellhut mission to Spain in January 1944. (illustration credit 10.4)

  IN ROME, Vera Lombardi knew nothing of what had transpired between Chanel and Schellenberg in Berlin. Edmonde Charles-Roux in her biography of Chanel writes that Chanel wrote to Vera to ask for her help in opening a business in Madrid and to tell her that the Germans would make arrangements to help Vera reach Chanel in Paris.

  IN JULY 1943 Mussolini’s bet that Fascism would bring a “New Order” to Europe had turned sour. In Rome Il Duce suddenly was replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio as head of the Italian government. Mussolini then escaped north to set up a rump Fascist government behind German lines north of the Po River.

  During the early war years, Vera Lombardi, the woman who had brought Bendor, Duke of Westminster, and English aristocrats like Winston Churchill into Chanel’s life, was living in Parioli, a chic residential quarter of Rome near the villa Borghese with her husband, Colonel Alberto Lombardi. He had been a Fascist Party member since 1929. Colonel Lombardi’s family had been close to Mussolini for nearly two decades. His brother, Giuseppe, was head of the Italian naval intelligence service.

  Despite having Italian citizenship through marriage and her connections to prominent Fascists, Vera’s royal blood and her English ways and looks now made her a suspect. Indeed, from 1936 the Italian secret police attached to the Ministry of the Interior and the Military Information Service had been tracking Vera’s visits to the British Embassy and her connections with the British community in Rome. She was suspected of being “a British informer.”

  Vera had been an informer, but there are no records of her being a British agent. When the police first suspected her of treachery against Italy she was writing her childhood friend Winston Churchill in London—then a member of Parliament—to tell him how popular Mussolini was in Italy. Her letter, “My Dear Winston, how I wish you were here …,” dated June 1935, urged Churchill to work to have Great Britain make friends with the dictator.

  An Italian secret police report of 1941 tells how: “an English lady, wife of an Italian officer living at Barnaba Oriana, 32, small villa [the Lombardi home address in Parioli] kept the light on during an air raid.” Two years later with Allied forces approaching Rome, the Fascist secret police systematically began arresting anyone suspected of Allied sympathies. In most cases they were interned at the Bagno a Ripoli concentration camp near Florence.

  Vera, “suspected of being an agent of the British secret services for the last ten years,” was arrested on November 12, 1943, and held in Rome’s women’s prison. Three days later, an Italian Ministry of the Interior directive stated: “The lady mentioned [Vera Bate Lombardi] must be transferred north of the Po River—advise exactly where the lady should be kept.” An answer came on November 15: “The lady should be kept at the Bagno a Ripoli.” A later handwritten addendum to the document ordered that Vera’s transfer must be “subject to agreement with relevant German authorities.”

  Seven days later, Vera was free. A joint Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Defense directive, dated November 24, 1943, declared: “The person [Vera Lombardi] held in the Rome prison has been released on November 22, on the orders of the German Police Headquarters in Rome. It seems that Arkwright Vera is free again …” (Arkwright was Vera’s maiden name.) The document was signed by the provincial police commander.

  Document from Chanel’s police file revealing that Chanel applied for and received a visa to travel to Spain in 1943 via “the intermediary of German authorities.” A 1948 Paris police report revealed Chanel gave no justification for the visa. It was granted by French authorities because of a direct order from the Paris SS chief, Karl Bömelburg. (illustration credit 10.5)

  Schellenberg had reached out and saved Ve
ra.

  BACK IN PARIS with Chanel, Dincklage arranged for her to be issued a passport and visa for Spain. The document was delivered on December 17, 1943. An official French notice accompanied the passport. It read in script: “Passport applied for and issued by the intermediary of German authorities … Passport 2652, delivered … for Spain.” It was granted by French authorities because of a direct order from the Paris Chief of the Gestapo, Karl Bömelburg. (A year later a top secret British memo addressed to Churchill’s secretary at 10 Downing Street, London, revealed: “there was conclusive evidence that [Vera Lombardi] was directly assisted on her journey [between Rome and Madrid] by the Sicherheitsdienst,” Schellenberg’s SD intelligence service.)

  IN LATE DECEMBER 1943 or early in January 1944 Chanel and Dincklage (with Vera) left Paris by train for the Spanish border crossing at Hendaye. They broke their journey there in order to pass through the French-German-Spanish border control. And there Dincklage met with Schellenberg’s liaison officer SS captain Walter Kutschmann, “who was told to deliver a large sum of money to Chanel in Madrid.”

  SS captain Walter Kutschmann in civilian dress. Kutschmann, SS general Walter Schellenberg’s liaison officer at the French border at Hendaye in 1944, was told to deliver a large sum of money to Chanel in Madrid that year. In 1946 he was number 182 on the list of wanted Nazi war criminals accused of killing thousands of Jews in Poland. (illustration credit 10.6)

  January 1944 letter from Henry Hankey, a senior diplomat at the British Embassy in Madrid. The letter reads: “My dear Francis, You may like to pass on to the Prime Minister the enclosed letter which we have been asked to forward by Mlle. Chanel, who claims to be a personal friend.” (illustration credit 10.7)