Coco Chanel & WWII: An Unfashionable Ensemble

She may have created the Little Black Dress, but Coco Chanel also had a decidedly black past. Many critics have expressed outrage over the fact that in the recent flurry of films released about the life of Coco Chanel (Coco Before Chanel, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, and the television movie Coco Chanel), not one of them makes mention of Chanel's life during WWII, when she was reputedly involved in a relationship with a Nazi officer and was perhaps a Nazi sympathizer (possibly even a Nazi agent) and renowned Anti-Semite.

Of course, one might also argue that Chanel was simply experiencing a momentary lack of judgment; a mere case of temporary insanity, and just doing what she needed to do to survive; that she herself was not in fact of the pro-Aryan persuasion and only appeared that way outwardly in order to outlive the war that had taken her beloved Paris by storm. So was Coco really a survivor? Or was she just an opportunist?

To shed some light on the subject, let’s take a look at Chanel’s earlier years. She was born on August 19, 1883 in the small city of Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, France to a poor family. She lost her mother when she was only twelve years old, and her father sent her and her sister to live in the orphanage of the Catholic monastery of Aubazine, where she learned to sew. When she was old enough to leave the orphanage, she found work as a seamstress and began singing at La Rotunde nightclub, where she gained her nickname “Coco” for her husky-voiced performances of the song “Ko Ko Ri Ko”. Coco later became the mistress of millionaire Étienne Balsan and began selling her hats to the sophisticated cosmopolitan crowd of social climbers, singers, artists, and actors who frequented Balsan’s parties, ingraciating herself among his circle of elite friends. The French admired Chanel’s brazen avante-gard attitude toward fashion and thought of her as the moden-day fairytale; a true life rags to riches success story of a woman who would do anything she had to do in order to get ahead.

Apparently, “anything” did not exclude taking as her lover a high-ranking Nazi officer, one Hans Gunther von Dincklage, whom some speculate Chanel was dating in order to maintain her home at the Paris Ritz Carlton, which the Nazis made their official headquarters during their occupation of Paris. The affair led Chanel’s biographers and critics to wonder if Chanel was in fact a German agent. Perhaps the most bizarre yet compelling aspect of this theory was her reported role in a plot fittingly titled Operation Modellhut. With the end of the war in sight and the Germans, in all probability, ostensibly coming out on the losing end, the SS planned to have Chanel utilize her connections within society to secretly meet with Winston Churchill and negotiate a peace agreement on behalf of her Nazi friends. Operation Modellhut failed, and Chanel was arrested for war crimes. When questioned by French interrogators about her relationship with Hans Gunther von Dincklage, she replied, “Really, sir, a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover.” The typical punishment for women accused of abetting Nazis during the War was to have their heads shaved and then be paraded through the streets, a punishment which Chanel narrowly avoided only by Churchill’s intervention on her behalf, which resulted in her release. She fled to Switzerland and did not return to Paris until almost a decade later.

While all signs point to “yay,” one tiny fact leads me to believe that Chanel did not truly harbor anti-semetic sentiments: her longstanding business partnership with the French Jewish businessman Pierre Wertheimer. Chanel relied upon Wertheimer's business connections and financial support in order to launch her perfume line in 1924, and I doubt that of all the wealthy men in the world who happened to also have a knack for business she would have picked a Jewish man to head up her company were she truly a subscriber of anti-semetic philosophy. But she did allow the opportunistic side to get the better of her once she became famous enough to no longer need the once sought-after financial backing Wertheimer could so amply provide.

In an underhanded attempt at exploiting Nazi pro-Aryan laws, during the German occupation of France she actually tried to use the laws banning Jews from owning businesses to her own advantage and "exterminate" Wertheimer from her perfume franchise. As per their initial business agreement, Wertheimer owned a whopping 70% of Parfums Chanel, while Chanel herself owned a mere 10% (Theophile Bader, the man who introduced the two back in 1922, owned the remaining 20%). Wertheimer had fled to America to escape the Nazis, and Chanel took his leave of absence as the ideal opportunity for her to seek majority control of the perfume sector of her business. Her attempt failed, as Wertheimer hired an Aryan proxy to run his business in France while he was away overseas.

So which one was she, a survivor or an opportunist? Chanel was never at risk for her life, and the Germans had no intention of destroying Paris, which they viewed as too beautiful to annihilate. That was never their mission, as it was in London. While Chanel personally may not have enthusiastically or maliciously sought out the deaths of over 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, she certainly did not resist German influence, nor did she turn away Nazi company from her bed. Chanel does not appear to have been a survivor as much as she was a woman who bent to the will of whomever had the most power at the time—The Nazis are taking over my beloved Ritz?! Time to find myself a German boyfriend. Germany may actually lose this war? Time to call up my old buddy Churchill!—even if that meant unscrupulously compromising her integrity.

One just might have hoped that as a woman who defied convention and made a name for herself by spurning the norm, uttering the words, “The most courageous act is still to think for yourself aloud,” that Coco Chanel herself would have found the courage to follow her own good advice.



Sources: Chanel and Her World by Edmonde Charles-Roux, The Chicago Tribune - "10 things you might not know about WWII", The Times - "Chanel and the Nazis", Fashion Model Directory - Chanel, The Dynamics of Fashion, 2nd Edition by Elaine Stone.