by Hal Vaughan
The Schellenberg MI6 report tells a slightly different version: “A week after Vera was freed she was flown to Madrid …”
Was Schellenberg’s memory faulty or had he lost touch with Dincklage as his liaison officer?
At Madrid Chanel and Lombardi checked into the Hôtel Ritz. Chanel then went to meet with her friend Sir Samuel Hoare at the British Embassy. British diplomat Brian Wallace (code name Ramon), who had reported to London in 1941 about the Chanel-Vaufreland Abwehr mission, again assisted Chanel.
The Schellenberg MI6 interrogation discloses, “… with Schellenberg’s permission Lombardi had also received a letter from Chanel delivered to her through [Reinhard] Spitzy urging [Vera] to see Churchill on her return to England.” The contents of this letter have never been revealed, and the letter has never turned up in archives searched by the author. (Apparently Schellenberg believed Vera Lombardi intended to try to reach Britain from Madrid.)
Then the Schellenberg MI6 transcript reveals a startling event: “On her arrival at that city [Madrid] … instead of carrying out the part that had been assigned to her [Vera] denounced all and sundry as a German agent to the British authorities. The result of this, however, was not only was Chanel denounced as a German agent but also Spitzy. In view of this obvious failure, contact was immediately dropped with Chanel and Lombardi.” (Dincklage must have known Reinhard Spitzy; the two men had worked for Abwehr chief Admiral Canaris.) The MI6 report adds, “Schellenberg does not know whether any communication was subsequently handed to Churchill through this woman.”
Again Dincklage’s role while in Madrid remains a mystery. Was his role as Schellenberg’s contact officer divulged to the British? Was he forced to leave Madrid?
Soon after Vera’s betrayal, Chanel asked senior British diplomat Henry Hankey at the British Embassy in Madrid to forward a letter to Churchill. Chanel’s letter, sent just before she left Madrid for Paris, never mentions SS General Walter Schellenberg or the Modellhut mission. The letter is an appeal to her old friend to help Vera Lombardi, now suspected of being an SS agent because of her involvement with Chanel in the Modellhut mission.
Henry Hankey then forwarded Chanel’s six-page handwritten letter to the prime minister’s office at 10 Downing Street. The Churchill archives at Chartwell have preserved a copy of Chanel’s letter, along with a note from one of Churchill’s assistants establishing that Chanel’s letter was received there; a few days later another Downing Street note establishes that Mrs. Churchill was shown Chanel’s letter while the prime minister was away.
Here is the text of Chanel’s letter to Churchill written by hand on notepaper from Hôtel Ritz, Place del Prado, Madrid:
My Dear Winston,
Excuse me to come & ask you in such moments as these … I had heard for some time that Vera Lombardi was not very happily treated in Italy on account of her being English and married with an Italian officer … You know me well enough to understand that I did everything in my power to pull her out of that situation which had indeed become tragic as the Fascists had simply locked her up in prison … I was obliged to address myself to someone rather important to get her freed and to be allowed to bring her down here with me … that I succeeded placed me in a very difficult situation as her passport which is Italian has been stamped with a German visa and I understand quite well that it looks a bit suspect … you can well imagine my dear after years of occupation in France it has been my lot to encounter all kinds of people! I would have pleasure to talk over all these things with you!
Enfin, Vera veut … en Italie où se trouve son mari. [In short, Vera wants to return to Italy to her husband.] Je crois qu’un mot de vous aplanirait toutes les difficultés et je rentrerais … tranquille en France car je ne peux pas l’abandonner là. J’espère que votre santé est meilleure. [I think a word from you would settle these difficulties and then I could return untroubled to France because I cannot abandon her (there). I hope your health has improved.] Je n’ose pas vous demander de me répondre mais naturellement un mot de vous serait un grand reconfort pour attendre la fin … [I do not dare to ask you to reply but naturally a word from you would be a great comfort as I wait the end …]
Croyez moi toujours très affectueusement …
[I remain always affectionately]
Coco Chanel
(Peut être Randolph peut me donner de vos nouvelles.)
[Perhaps Randolph could give me news of you.]
CHURCHILL WAS NOT in London to receive Chanel’s letter. He was seriously ill in Tunisia with a temperature of 102 and had been bedridden with pneumonia since December 12, 1943. He had been in Tehran for a conference with Roosevelt and Stalin and had gone to Tunisia to see Eisenhower on a stopover. The prime minister was then moved to La Mamounia, a palace of a hotel in Marrakech, Morocco, on January 5. He would not return to London until January 19, 1944. Churchill’s illness was a tightly kept secret, though Ambassador Hoare in Madrid may have known that Churchill was indisposed. In any event, the Modellhut mission was doomed. Chanel’s reference to Churchill’s health may have meant that she knew from Hoare that the prime minister had fallen ill.
By the time Chanel’s letter arrived at 10 Downing Street, Chanel and Dincklage were back in Paris. Later, Chanel would travel to Berlin to explain to Schellenberg why things had gone so poorly in Madrid.
In the aftermath of the Chanel-Dincklage failed mission at Madrid, Winston Churchill, the British spy agency MI6, and British diplomats would become tangled in the Vera Lombardi imbroglio. Later, Chanel would fear being blackmailed by the Modellhut actors.
IN MARCH 1944, a two-page hand-scribbled letter from Vera Lombardi arrived at the South Street, London, town house of Lady Ursula Filmer Sankey, Bendor’s daughter. The letter contained a plea from Vera to her friend Ursula to intervene with her father and Churchill to get her out of Madrid and home to Rome. Vera’s anxiety mounted over the weeks after Chanel’s departure. She knew that the British suspected her of being an agent of the SS. And she feared the British would refuse to allow her to return to liberated Rome and Alberto Lombardi, her husband.
The appeal to Westminster’s daughter arrived in London at a moment when Churchill was embroiled in a quarrel with the Americans over a Mediterranean strategy. The United States wanted to invade France to appease Stalin. Churchill wanted to attack through the Mediterranean Sea.
Over the months to come, the prime minister of Great Britain would devote precious time to saving Vera Lombardi.
SOME HISTORIANS AND BIOGRAPHERS have stated that Schellenberg’s use of Chanel as an emissary to reach Churchill through Madrid was a harebrained idea. Sir Stuart Hampshire, a wartime officer of MI6, thought Schellenberg was badly informed about Churchill’s determination to see the war through to Germany’s capitulation.
Despite the Allies’ January 1943 Casablanca agreement calling for Germany’s unconditional surrender, senior officials in the United States and Britain believed that if Hitler could be done away with and hostilities with the United States and Britain suspended, the German military could check the Russian advance in eastern Europe and Germany. In this way a Communist takeover of Europe could be avoided.
By the spring of 1944 many members of Schellenberg’s SS intelligence services and Abwehr military intelligence officers, among them Dincklage, had ceased to believe in an ultimate German victory. Members of the Abwehr intelligence service were soon to be merged under General Schellenberg into the SS Military Intelligence service—they were scanning the horizon for a possibility of negotiating an end to the war. And Schellenberg’s growing desperation to open negotiations—his many maneuvers and stratagems—coincided with signals from the Allied and British politicians that an early end to hostilities with Germany was needed to stop Soviet advances into Germany and Stalin’s invasion of all Europe.
The SS leader was not alone in seeking a new strategy for Germany. In 1943 German foreign minister Ribbentrop and Dincklage’s boss, Abwehr chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, were communi
cating with senior Allied officers to shape a deal. As early as 1943, Dulles, the OSS chief in Bern, secretly sought an early accommodation with Germany through Swiss and Swedish intermediaries and sympathetic Germans and senior German officers. Dulles believed the United States and Britain needed to make arrangements with the Germans before the Russians overran Europe. He argued that the Casablanca declaration calling for unconditional surrender by Germany was “merely a piece of paper to be scrapped without further ado if Germany would sue for peace.” Dulles contended: “Hitler had to go.”
Thirty-eight-year-old Count Claus von Stauffenberg, chief of staff for the German Reserve Army, and fellow officers now acted. Their plan to assassinate Hitler, called Operation Valkyrie, also mandated that upon Hitler’s death, there would be a quick peace deal with England to prevent the Soviets from overrunning Berlin and Bolshevizing it.
ON JULY 20, 1944, Stauffenberg attended a high-level conference presided over by Hitler. When Stauffenberg entered the führer’s command post—Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) near Rastenburg in East Prussia—he placed his briefcase, loaded with a fuse and explosives, near where Hitler sat. He then triggered the fuse to ignite the explosives stored inside the case and left the room.
Only one of the explosives went off, wounding Hitler. The plot had failed. Stauffenberg and his heroic fellow German officers paid with their lives. A few months later, Admiral Canaris was arrested by Schellenberg on Himmler’s orders; there was evidence that Canaris had aided the plotters. The Abwehr was then merged with the SS. Canaris was murdered in April 1945 at Flossenburg concentration camp. At the same time Dincklage was transferred into the new SS military intelligence organization.
ELEVEN
COCO’S LUCK
The rich, the clever and well connected escaped punishment—they returned after the storm …
—FRENCH RESISTANT GASTON DEFFERRE
EARLY ON THE MORNING of Tuesday, June 6, 1944, the French-language BBC broadcasts to France told of the Allied D-Day landings at Normandy and proclaimed Paris would soon be freed. Thousands of American, British, French, and other Allied troops had landed on the beaches, parachuted onto roofs and treetops, and glided in on planes only 73 miles (123 kilometers) from the center of Paris. France was startled. The news was soon confirmed by radio and press reports. Le Matin headlined: “France Is a Battlefield Again!”
It was a grim moment for Chanel and other Nazi collaborators. She and Jean Cocteau, Serge Lifar, and Paul Morand were among hundreds whose names could be found on the blacklist kept by the French Resistance. If the Germans were forced to abandon Paris, Chanel and her friends faced trial and punishment at the hands of men and women who had suffered humiliation and worse under the Nazis. In the days that followed, Parisians kept their eyes on the flagpoles atop nearly every public building in Paris. Were the swastikas still there? If so, the Germans were still around. For Parisians, an unadorned flagpole might mean that the Germans had fled.
On the English coast at Portsmouth, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Overlord D-Day operations, seemed to wear a perpetual grin on his face. Whereas, in Berlin, Hitler threw a tantrum. His once-favorite commanders, General Gerd von Rundstedt and General Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, had bluntly warned their master to “end this war while considerable parts of the German Army are still in being.” Von Rundstedt was sacked; Rommel committed suicide, to save his family from Hitler’s wrath.
At the Hôtel Lutetia, Dincklage, Momm, and their fellow Abwehr officers began packing their files or burning them. As they made preparations to leave Paris for Germany, Allied warplanes commenced bombing the Paris region. Slowly the Ritz emptied. Its German guests were going home to seek safety.
DINCKLAGE FLED sometime after the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler had failed. Chanel, age sixty-one (though she could pass for fifty), soon moved into her rue Cambon apartment across from the Ritz in the breathless heat of August when bits of ash once again covered everything. As Allied bombers struck Paris suburbs, the Germans burned documents day and night just as the French had four years earlier when Paris was evacuated. Chanel wasn’t totally alone; she had her butler, Léon, and her faithful maid, Germaine, at her side.
In Berlin, Schellenberg renewed efforts to meet with neutral arbitrators. He finally connected with Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat, and asked him to try to mediate a truce via British diplomats stationed in Stockholm. As a sign of sincerity, Schellenberg ordered his SS agents to free and turn over some American, French, and English prisoners being held at the SS camps of Ravensbruck and Neuengamme. It was his signal to the British that he and Himmler were no longer Nazi die-hards. It would later save Schellenberg’s life.
As the Allied armies approached Paris, Chanel contacted Pierre Reverdy, her on-again, off-again lover of the past twenty years. In the very early days of the occupation Reverdy had made a trip to Paris to see Chanel before he joined a French resistance group to fight Germans. Chanel was not there. She was still with the Palasse family at Corbère. Now at Chanel’s urging he set out to find and arrest Vaufreland. Chanel must have hoped that Vaufreland, the one Frenchman who could prove her connections to the Nazis, would disappear permanently.
With his partisan fighters, Reverdy located Vaufreland hiding at the Paris apartment of the Count Jean-René de Gaigneron. The baron was seized and hauled off with other collabos to a Resistance prison. Later he would be held at the Drancy camp on the outskirts of Paris—the very facility that had so recently housed Jewish families awaiting deportation to Nazi camps. All Vaufreland would say later about Reverdy’s strange intervention was: “He had something against me.”
Chanel’s friend Serge Lifar had been rehearsing the Chota Roustavelli ballet at the Paris Opéra throughout June under opera masters Arthur Honegger and Charles Munch. Now, as Allied forces approached Paris, Lifar turned down an offer to be flown to neutral Switzerland in a private aircraft owned by Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan. Instead, Lifar slipped into Chanel’s apartment at the rue Cambon to hide. Chanel told a friend, “I couldn’t walk around the apartment even half undressed because Serge might be hiding in a closet.” Later, Lifar gave himself up to the purge committee of the Opéra, and was made to retire for one year—a slap-on-the-wrist punishment for his collaboration with the Nazis. Many of Coco’s close friends had good reason to go into hiding. “Feelings of hatred and revenge permeated French society … there had been so much suffering, humiliation, and shame, so many victims of betrayal, torture, and deportation.” Most Frenchmen had lived through four long years as prisoners, watched over and humiliated by a million or so Germans. People had sought to survive—some honorably; others, like Chanel, Vaufreland, Cocteau, and Lifar would soon be accused as collabos.
THE LAST TRAINLOAD of Jewish prisoners left France on their way to Auschwitz on August 17—days later desperate street fighting between German troops and Free French and Communist partisans broke out. The insurrection to free Paris of the hated Boche invader was under way as General Charles de Gaulle landed in Normandy. Meanwhile, General Philippe Leclerc’s Free French troopers were advancing on the city.
Late in the evening of August 24, Leclerc’s advanced column arrived in Paris. The next day Leclerc tankers clad in GI khakis donated by the Americans, and French sailors, with their distinctive caps topped with a red pompom, invested key points of the city. All of France would be freed in the few months to come.
By August 25, Leclerc’s army had taken Paris, German general Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered, and General Charles de Gaulle, head of the Provisional French Government, entered Paris to meet with Leclerc and other senior officers and aides.
The following day de Gaulle led his famous march down the Champs Élysées to Notre Dame for a solemn mass. Earlier, at the Hôtel de Ville he proclaimed, “Paris! Paris outragé! Paris brisé! Paris martyrisé! Mais Paris libéré”—words that made Parisians cry with joy. They were recorded in English history as: “Paris! Paris ravaged! Paris brok
en! Paris martyred! But Paris free!”
But for some, the words were ominous—meaning retribution was at hand.
To watch de Gaulle march down the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Concorde, Chanel, Lifar, and a host of invited guests had gathered at the apartment of the Serts, which overlooked the Place de la Concorde. If their biographers are to be believed, many of them, including Chanel, her friend the Count de Beaumont, and Lifar, were anxious about their highly visible roles as German collabos. They hoped José-Marie Sert, the wartime Spanish ambassador to the Vatican (but living in Paris), might shield them from the vengeance that would be meted out by de Gaulle’s resistance fighters.
Humiliated German officers fallen into the hands of soldiers of the Second French Armored Division, Paris, August 1944. (illustration credit 11.1)
German collaborators were hunted down in liberated France; women who had fallen in with the German invader were humiliated. Seen here are two women bearing Nazi swastikas on their shorn heads. (illustration credit 11.2)
Two weeks later, Chanel was arrested.
AFTER THE LIBERATION, French writer Robert Aron calculated that between thirty and forty thousand collaborators were summarily executed.
To end this drumhead justice, de Gaulle’s Provisional Government established special courts in mid-September 1944 to deal with collaboration. Those found guilty faced execution, others guilty of lesser forms of collaboration—the newly invented crime of national unworthiness (indignité nationale)—were punished by the loss of the right to vote, to stand for election and hold public office, and to practice certain professions.
