Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War

by Hal Vaughan

  The interrogation of Baron Louis de Vaufreland began with his arrest by Reverdy and his résistance partisans. It would take five years for Vaufreland to be brought to trial at the Palais de Justice, the Paris court where Marie-Antoinette had been tried and sentenced to the guillotine during the horrors of France’s revolutionary purges. On July 12 and 13, 1949, some 160 years later, Vaufreland stood accused of multiple crimes of aiding the enemy in wartime. He faced a single, solemnly robed judge and a four-member civilian jury.

  AFTER BEING REPEATEDLY summoned by Judge Serre, Chanel finally appeared before Judge Fernand Paul Leclercq. Her interrogation by Leclercq was based on voluminous court records containing Vaufreland’s testimony about her work for the Abwehr. An excerpt of the court stenographer’s record of her testimony follows. It seems certain Chanel had been carefully coached by her lawyers:

  Chanel began by telling Judge Leclercq she had met Vaufreland in 1941 at the Hôtel Ritz and through the Count and Countess Gabriel de la Rochefoucauld.

  She added that Vaufreland gave the impression of being “a frivolous young man speaking a lot of nonsense. He was visibly of abnormal morals and everything in his manner of dressing and of perfuming himself revealed what he was. I didn’t trust him. If he was in relations with certain Germans, they could only be of a sexual nature …” However, “he was an amiable boy and always ready to render service.”

  Chanel admitted that at the time of their first meeting, Vaufreland knew all about her nephew, André Palasse, who was a prisoner of war in Germany at the time.

  Leclercq didn’t press Chanel as to how Vaufreland knew André was a prisoner in Germany or how he came to meet Chanel. In any case, according to Chanel’s testimony, “Vaufreland claimed he could bring him [André] back. I accepted the offer Vaufreland spontaneously made …

  “In fact my nephew was repatriated some months later, and I cannot personally say if this was due or not to an intervention by the Germans at the request of Vaufreland. He assured me that he had personally arranged [Palasse’s] freedom, and I continue to believe it.… He seemed very desirous to please me … and I offered Vaufreland money but he refused, only asking me to loan him some furniture.”

  As Allied troops threatened to liberate Paris, Dincklage returned to Nazi Germany. In December 1944 he applied for permission to enter Switzerland—one of many efforts he made to join Chanel, who had fled to Lausanne. The Swiss refused his appeal. (illustration credit 11.6)

  THE TEXT OF CHANEL’S TESTIMONY does not include Judge Leclercq’s questions to Chanel as the judge went about the process of discovery. However, he pressed her to determine if she was in contact with German officials when meeting Vaufreland. To this Chanel volunteered, “Vaufreland had come to see me on several occasions under the pretext of giving me news of his efforts. Never did he come to my home, at least not into my personal dwelling, in the company of a German. It is possible he came into the store where I was never present and where indeed some Germans came to buy perfume. He never introduced me to any German, and the only German I knew during the Occupation was the Baron Dinchlage [sic], established in France before the war and married to an Israelite.”

  Index card from French archives with Chanel’s name handwritten above the inscription “Art 75 I 4787,” referring to a French Ministry of Justice file (never found) and related to Chanel’s suspected collusion with the Germans in wartime. (illustration credit 11.7)

  JUDGE LECLERCQ MUST HAVE studied the Vaufreland testimony to Judge Serre. Leclercq pressed Chanel to explain how it came about that she traveled to Madrid with Vaufreland.

  Chanel stated,

  I met de Vaufreland in the train I had taken around the month of August 1941 to go to Spain. I obtained a passport through regular channels from the Police Préfecture … to obtain it and the visa I personally made the necessary arrangements with the German service … without any intervention on the part of Vaufreland. It was completely by accident that we met on the train. However, I was happy to find myself with him in Madrid because being born of a Spanish mother and speaking the language fluently, he rendered me service in a country where there had recently been a revolution and where police formalities were very strict … He never had an attitude I might suspect. After my nephew’s return, I asked de Vaufreland to put some distance between his visits. In fact my nephew, whom I had asked to be friendly to de Vaufreland … didn’t hide that after a year of captivity he couldn’t bear that sort of person [homosexuals] … And as my nephew was living with me and to prevent any incidents between them—I believed it my duty to warn de Vaufreland.

  Judge Leclercq put a series of questions to Chanel based on documents supplied by police and intelligence officers. When asked about her relations with Vaufreland’s Abwehr masters Chanel replied: “I never knew any Germans by the names of Neubauer or Niebuhr … de Vaufreland did not present me to the Germans with whom he had relations.”

  Leclercq now questioned Chanel based on sworn testimony made by Vaufreland’s Abwehr boss, German lieutenant Niebuhr, and Sonderführer Notterman (both men were now working for the U.S. Army counterintelligence service [CIC] in Germany).

  When Chanel was told of Niebuhr’s and Notterman’s statements about their meetings, their relationships, and Chanel’s trip to Spain, she replied: “I maintain I never asked anything from Vaufreland, neither for my nephew, nor for the trip I wanted to make to Spain.”

  Vaufreland had testified before Judge Serre that he helped Chanel get in touch with the Nazi authorities in charge of the Aryanization of property or businesses owned by Jews—in particular about the Wertheimer ownership of 90 percent of the Chanel perfume business. When questioned about this Chanel volunteered, “I never asked Vaufreland to be involved with the re-opening of my perfume business.” Then, with reference to her use of Nazi laws to Aryanize Jewish businesses, Chanel dodged the question, saying, “The Chanel establishments were never sequestrated. There was a temporary administrator for around three weeks; and the business ‘Aryanized’ thanks to a scheme of the Wertheimer brothers with one of their friends … It is possible that Vaufreland overheard a conversation on this subject but I didn’t ask anything of him.”

  Judge Leclercq went no further. He apparently did not know that Félix Amiot—a non-Jew with connections to Hermann Göring—had taken over the Chanel perfume business in trust for the Wertheimers.

  Chanel continued: “As for my Spanish trip, the official purpose of it was the purchase of primary material essential to the manufacture of perfume, and it was for this reason that I obtained my passport … It is true that I knew people in high circles in England, with whom I spoke by telephone thanks to the British Embassy in Madrid. I wanted above all to have news about the Duke of Westminster, who was very ill at the time … I personally knew Mr. Winston Churchill but I didn’t phone him about this subject, not wanting to bother him at that time.”

  When confronted with Vaufreland’s sworn statements that an Abwehr officer named Hermann Niebuhr had conferred with Chanel at her office and about an Abwehr-sponsored trip to Spain in 1941, she testified, “As for the alleged visit of Niebuhr to rue Cambon, I protest strongly against this assertion of Vaufreland, who never brought a German to see me. I can even say that I only saw him one time in the company of a German and that was on the last day of the Occupation, when he came by rue Cambon in the company of a German officer …”

  Neither Judge Leclercq nor Judge Serre ever referred to Chanel’s second trip to Madrid in 1944 for SS officer Walter Schellenberg. They may not have seen the documents in French intelligence files or, for political reasons, chose to ignore Chanel’s collaboration with the SS. The court never questioned Chanel about her four-year wartime relationship with senior Abwehr officer Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage.

  Judge Leclercq then advised Chanel that Niebuhr had given sworn testimony, confirmed by Vaufreland, that the Vaufreland-Chanel mission to Madrid in 1941 was financed by the Abwehr.

  Chanel replied: “I protest
against his declarations, which are clearly implausible. I have no memory of a German that Vaufreland would have introduced me to.” Then, faced with Niebuhr’s testimony, she said, “At the Ritz, one met many people in a mixed society … Vaufreland may have introduced me to this man whom I would very much like to see; and in any event I certainly didn’t see him in uniform. He must have spoken French fluently which would have left me ignorant of his nationality.”

  Continuing, she ventured, “I certainly did not esteem Vaufreland and didn’t hide it because I am in the habit of saying frankly what I think. As to the idea of sending me on a mission to England to approach the Prime Minister and the Duchess of York, Queen of England at the time, [the idea] doesn’t stand up under examination; and I never received money from such an individual … [My financial] situation is sufficiently great for that to be ridiculous. In my opinion this individual [Lieutenant Niebuhr] tried by some fanciful declarations to explain his own relations with de Vaufreland.”

  Faced with the records that the Abwehr had registered her as one of their agents, Chanel argued, “I never was aware of my registration in a German service and I protest with indignation against such an absurdity … It is true I passed through the border post of Hendaye but I was never the object and neither was Vaufreland of special treatment on the part of the Germans. We spent two hours standing in a waiting room and after an hour, a German officer, seeing me very tired, had me given a chair. It is the only consideration of which I was the object.” Then, Chanel added, “I remember now … Vaufreland told me that he too was leaving [Paris]. If he believed he had to signal our departure to this Niebuhr, he did it himself without my knowing about it, to undoubtedly avoid difficulties for us at the border.”

  Finally, Chanel told Judge Leclercq: “I could arrange for a declaration to come from Mr. Duff Cooper, former British Ambassador, who would be able to attest to the respect I enjoy in English society.”

  There is no record that Judge Leclercq made any attempt to discover why Chanel had maintained a long relation with Vaufreland, allowing him to stay at her Roquebrune villa on the Côte d’Azur in the spring of 1942, about the same time she and Dincklage were there.

  LECLERCQ HAD PREVIOUSLY interrogated André Palasse. His testimony was to the point:

  Before the war, I was Director of the Chanel Silk Establishments. Made prisoner in 1940, I was repatriated in November 1941. Since it was impossible for me to resume the direction of the Chanel enterprise in Lyon, Mademoiselle Chanel … entrusted me with the post of Director of the company with headquarters at 31, rue Cambon in Paris.

  I didn’t know Vaufreland before the war. I only made his acquaintance several days after I was made Director … [when] he declared that thanks to his relations with the Germans, I had been liberated. Mademoiselle Chanel also told me that she had asked Vaufreland to use all his influence to get me freed.

  I met Vaufreland five or six times at Mademoiselle Chanel’s home. Then I lost sight of him from the beginning of 1942. I cannot be sure that Vaufreland had me freed; I have no proof of it. I repeat—I only knew what Vaufreland and Mademoiselle Chanel told me.

  A jury trial in session in Paris’s Palais de Justice where Chanel would give testimony about her trip to Madrid with Abwehr spy Baron Louis de Vaufreland. (illustration credit 11.8)

  ON JULY 13, 1949, Baron Louis de Vaufreland was found guilty on a number of counts dealing with cooperation with the enemy and sentenced to six years in prison. There is no record of whether his sentence included time already served in prison. Chanel returned to her safe haven in Switzerland, but Vaufreland’s trial judge was still unsatisfied. The trial record adds, “The answers Mademoiselle Chanel gave to the court were deceptive. The court will decide if her case should be pursued.”

  There was no press coverage of Vaufreland’s trial and no mention of Chanel. His sentence had come in the middle of other trials of Nazi collaborators. Judges and juries were overwhelmed with cases, and readers of the French press were inundated with reports of trials revealing Nazi war crimes.

  Not the least of the trials covered in the international and French press was the trial of war criminal Otto Abetz—the Nazi general who as Berlin’s representative in Paris during the occupation gave lavish parties at the German Embassy there. In July 1949 Abetz was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. He was released in 1954 and died four years later in a car accident. His death, the newspapers speculated, may have been a revenge killing for sentencing Jews to the gas chamber.

  CHANEL’S DENIAL of her cooperation with the Abwehr and her contradictions of Vaufreland, Lieutenant Niebuhr, and Sonderführer Notterman’s testimonies were never questioned. Chanel was never confronted with a copy of the Abwehr warning to the Gestapo police post at the French-Spanish border town of Hendaye that Chanel and Vaufreland were to be assisted in crossing into Spain. Her nephew André’s slips about Vaufreland’s frequent visits to rue Cambon and his use of Chanel’s office were passed over. There is no evidence Judge Serre or Judge Leclercq pressed Chanel to explain why if Louis de Vaufreland was so odious he was a frequent visitor at her rue Cambon offices and at the Ritz. And Judge Leclercq never questioned Chanel about her relations with Dincklage and her mission to Spain for the Abwehr in 1941. Finally, the court record is void of questions about Chanel’s mission to Madrid for SS general Schellenberg. U.S. authorities didn’t learn until after the war that Chanel’s second mission to Spain for Himmler was financed by Schellenberg, or that his liaison officer in Hendaye, SS captain Walter Kutschmann, was a Nazi war criminal. They may never have been informed by U.S. intelligence sources of this crucial fact.

  By 1949, few officials were interested in connecting the dots that led to Chanel’s betrayal of France. The details of her collaboration with the Nazis were hidden for years in French, German, Italian, Soviet, and U.S. archives. Indeed, during the occupation of France, the German authorities pulled documents from French intelligence files and shipped them to Berlin. Later, they would be discovered in Nazi archives by Soviet intelligence officers in Berlin and shipped to Moscow. They remained there as a reference for Soviet intelligence until circa 1985. An agreement between Russia and France finally provided for thousands of files to be repatriated to the French military archives at the Château de Vincennes.

  THE VAUFRELAND INVESTIGATION in France and Germany took some five years and involved police and intelligence organizations in Berlin and Paris. Details in French intelligence files were known only to a few—and British and French intelligence services did not share information. Vaufreland’s testimony and the statements of the German Abwehr officers who had dealt with Chanel in Paris (both Niebuhr and Notterman were working for Allied intelligence services after 1945) were found in hundreds of typescript pages recently declassified by French and German authorities.

  French men and women who lived through the occupation had closed their eyes to the atrocities of the Nazis. When asked about their lives during that era, many replied, “The days of the German occupation of France were hard times. During the war years, strange things happened … better to put all that behind us.”

  AFTER TESTIFYING at the Vaufreland trial, Chanel quietly slipped back across the French border to a house she had bought and redecorated near Lausanne. Her four years of collaboration never really became a public issue.

  Dincklage spent time hiding in postwar Germany as Allied interrogators sought out former Abwehr and SS officers. Later, he sought refuge at his aunt’s estate, Rosencrantz Manor near Schinkel in northern Germany.

  In October 1945 he was on his way to Rosencrantz with an American GI named Hans Schillinger, a friend of Chanel’s former photographer Horst. Suddenly the two men were stopped by a British patrol as they crossed the Nord-Ostsee canal in the British zone of Germany. Dincklage was in trouble. He was found to be carrying more than $8,000, 1,340 Norwegian kroner, 100 Slovak koruna, and 33 gold pieces at a time when it was a crime to transport large sums of undeclared foreign currency across Allied zon
es. He and Schillinger were arrested and the money impounded as British authorities launched an investigation.

  During questioning by British military police, Schillinger admitted “he received the money from Mademoiselle Chanel of Société des Parfums Chanel while he was on leave in Paris. Chanel had asked him to deliver the money to Dincklage.”

  The British finally confiscated the money and the men were released. Much later when a British officer questioned Chanel in Paris they received the following reply to a question put to her: “Mademoiselle Chanel has stated she does not want the money back as it might involve her in trouble with the French government for being in possession of undeclared foreign currency. [S]he therefore desires that it be donated to any charity the authorities wish to name.” There is no record of how the British finally disposed of the confiscated money.

  In December 1945, Dincklage reached Rosencrantz Manor, where his mother, Lorry, had been living during and since the war. Shortly thereafter, Dincklage joined Chanel in Switzerland.

  The Rosencrantz estate near Kiel, Germany, where Dincklage lived for a short time while he tried to get permission to join Chanel in Switzerland. (illustration credit 11.9)

  TWELVE

  COMEBACK COCO

  I have never known failure.

  —COCO CHANEL

  AN AGING CHANEL was not ready for a pleasant retirement in Switzerland—with or without Dincklage at her side. Years earlier she had told photographer Horst, “I am tired! Naturally, it is a lie. I am well and full of ideas for many things in the future.”