Coco Chanel

by Lisa Chaney

  In this period, any woman even found in the company of a German risked being accused of horizontal collaboration. To a large extent, while they were sometimes “turned in” by other women, the feeling against them derived as much from the sense of personal and national emasculation felt by French men, living under an occupying army. While postwar prosecution of these women was seen as a kind of cleansing process, they were also used as scapegoats for the sense of impotence their menfolk had experienced during the war.

  Whatever the resulting censure, these liaisons nonetheless took place. Frequently, these women were vulnerable in one way or another: they might be young, single or divorced, and their first contact with a German was often in the workplace. By the middle of 1943, approximately eighty thousand women from the occupied zone were claiming support from the Germans for the children resulting from these liaisons. In Gabrielle’s case, with a ruthlessness attendant upon her fear of growing old, combined with her underlying loneliness, she, too, had her own particular vulnerability.

  Who then, was Gabrielle’s German lover, the man who, like her, professed to hate war?

  27

  Von Dincklage

  Among certain upper sections of Parisian society, Hans Günther von Dincklage had been known for a number of years before the war, as a handsome and engaging German diplomat of eminently respectable pedigree. An acquaintance remembered that “he possessed the kind of beauty that both men and women like . . . His open face indicated an innocent sinner. He was very tall, very slender, had very light hair . . . He danced very well and was a dazzling entertainer.”1

  Von Dincklage was born in 1896. His mother, Marie-Valery Kutter-Micklefield, was English and his father, Baron Georg-Jito von Dincklage, came from an impoverished but distinguished line. The boy grew up at the family castle in Schleswig-Holstein and, at seventeen, joined his father’s cavalry regiment, the King’s 13th Uhlans. Hans Günther proved himself a gifted horseman—“his body possessed the suppleness of a rider’s”—and he excelled at the game of polo.2 After fighting on the Russian front during the First World War, he was a senior lieutenant at its conclusion. Lacking any civilian education and without a profession to look forward to, he drifted into a series of occupations. It appears he had few qualms about how principled these were. “At first he was a member of one of those volunteer corps which organized civil war in the Republic and for years threatened it with uprisings . . . then, during the inflation he turned his hand to profiteering.”3

  By 1924, he had joined a textile manufacturer with whom his family had important interests, and he represented the firm in various European countries, including Switzerland. In that same year, von Dincklage had seduced a well-born young woman, Maximiliana von Schoenebeck, into running away with him. Catsy, as Maximiliana was often known, was the daughter of Baron von Schoenebeck, an art-collecting aristocrat whose Schloss was at Baden. Catsy’s mother was Jewish. Her half sister, the writer Sybille Bedford, described her as “an attractive, happy-natured, life-enhancing, vital young woman,” whose family would come to believe that von Dincklage was “a disaster of lifelong consequences.”4 In 1928, the young couple moved to Sanary, in the south of France. Until a few years before a modest fishing village, Sanary had transformed itself into a select seaside resort. Discovered by a few French artists, including Cocteau, the little town had become particularly popular with von Dincklage’s compatriots.

  The stock market crash of 1929 saw him lose his partnership in the textile firm and, in 1930, he was describing himself as “an independent merchant” who had acquired a post in Sanary overseeing transport.5 In early 1933, von Dincklage became the national representative for a French cash register firm, and traveled regularly to Germany, ostensibly to study the cash register’s manufacture. These trips were in fact a cover for what had become the other source of his employment: the new German government.6

  Having helped Catsy go through her considerable inheritance, after Hitler’s rise to absolute power, at the beginning of 1933, von Dincklage had “placed his hopes in National Socialism.” As a result, in May of that year, he was resident in Paris with his wife for “the purpose of making contacts.”7 One is drawn to contrast this particular polo player with that other polo-playing lover of Gabrielle’s during the previous war. Arthur Capel had suffered from the ennui of his times and had been capable of emotional carelessness. Yet, drawn into the war and finding himself torn between Gabrielle Chanel and Diana Wyndham, despite his ultimate failure, he was a man who appeared to have grown in emotional and moral stature. Capel and von Dincklage could not have been more different.

  With Hitler’s increased hold over Germany, a number of distinguished German Jews made their escape from the Gestapo to Sanary, where they took up exile. Soon the resort became something of an artistic German colony, acquiring the sobriquet “capital of German literature.” Among its illustrious refugees were Mahler’s widow, Alma; Bertholt Brecht; Arnold Zweig; Ludwig Marcuse and the magisterial Thomas Mann and his extended family. A small contingent of English émigrés included Aldous and Maria Huxley, Julian Huxley and his wife, and D. H. Lawrence and his German wife, Frieda.

  Catsy’s mother (a hopeless morphine addict) had taken up residence in Sanary with her new Italian husband sometime before, and they had befriended a number of important local German figures, including Ute von Stöhrer, whose husband was then German ambassador in Cairo. Unbeknownst to anyone in Sanary, including Thomas Mann and his family, who were staying in the von Stöhrers’ villa, von Stöhrer was also in the employ of the German intelligence service.8

  In the summer of 1933, von Dincklage was appointed to the post of cultural attaché at the German embassy in Paris. A notoriously vague position, this frequently involved undercover activities. Indeed, by this time, the French Deuxième Bureau, the country’s external military intelligence agency, was constructing a file on von Dincklage. By August 1933, he in turn had sent a propaganda report back to his Nazi superiors in Germany.9

  At around this time, Catsy’s younger sister, Sybille, was made party to a conversation that left her deeply shocked. Sitting with her friend Aldous Huxley in Barcelona, awaiting takeoff in a plane bound for Sanary, they were directly behind a well-groomed German couple. After a few moments, Sybille realized they were talking about her sister and von Dincklage. The woman said:“Maybe they owe him now . . . there always was that rumor of his having been mixed up with some extreme right-wing students’ gang during our Revolution, so called . . . Gave a hand when they put down the Communist putsch, some say he was in at the Rosa Luxemburg murder [in 1919].”

  “Too young,” he said. “He may have been there—standing guard by the wall . . . ?”

  “When the woman tried to get away through the window,” she said. “You make me shiver . . . He’s very decorative . . . international polish . . . adds up to a reassuring presence for the French. But aren’t we forgetting that his wife’s Jewish?” . . .

  “You know, I think I hear that the von Dincklages are divorcing. No one outside Germany is supposed to know.”

  “Ah . . . that would square it. Racial purity at home, liberal attitudes abroad. A quick, quiet divorce arranged by our authorities . . .”

  [Young Sybille looked at Huxley.] I knew he had understood . . . He put his hand inside his coat and pulled out . . . the leather-bound traveling flask . . . he unscrewed the cap and held it over to me.10

  Meanwhile, when von Dincklage officially left his post at the embassy in June 1934,11 he told friends that he had been ejected from his position as cultural attaché because he was married to a Jew. Assuring Catsy that there was nothing personal in his departure, von Dincklage now left her. Catsy loved her husband and was forgiving. She believed von Dincklage’s stories and hoped he would return to her. Meanwhile, she moved back to Sanary, where her mother and stepfather still lived.

  Von Dincklage now traveled widely, performing various missions for Hitler’s government in Athens and various Balkan states. He happened
to be in Marseille just one day before the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and Foreign Minister Barthou of France. He happened to be in Tunis at a time when systematic and violent anti-French agitation was in progress.12 He also went to stay periodically at Sanary with Catsy. He liked her well enough; he also needed her to keep their separation secret, not wanting her distinguished, and useful, Parisian friends to think ill of him.13 Von Dincklage had been suspected of being an agent in diplomat’s disguise by some at Sanary for a while,14 suspicions eventually to be confirmed. While von Dincklage kept an eye on the activities and whereabouts of the important Jewish émigré community, he was simultaneously collecting information on the nearby port of Toulon, the most important naval base in France.

  But von Dincklage had to be seen to have a job. A Russian émigré friend, Alex Liberman—a future friend of Gabrielle’s and eventually editorial director of Condé Nast Publications in New York—found von Dincklage employment as a journalist.15 Then, in 1935, von Dincklage suffered a serious setback in his propaganda work for Hitler’s government. In January of that year, a book entitled Das Braune Netz (The Brown Network) was published in Paris.16 Its subtitle was How Hitler’s Agents Abroad Are Working to Prepare the War, and its aim was to alert the West to the potential “Nazi espionage and fifth column activities outside Germany.” The book contained a list of all known Nazi agents, country by country, and the French list was headed by Otto Abetz (future ambassador). But one of the most prominent on the list of agents for France was von Dincklage.

  A series of reports for his superiors had been stolen from von Dincklage and used as one of the central pieces of evidence for the book’s claims. Printing a selection of von Dincklage’s weekly reports back to Berlin, the book exposed his activities and showed “the many channels used by Goebbels and the Gestapo in common for the execution of their work abroad.” A letter from von Dincklage to the Paris correspondent of a major German newspaper alerts one to his nickname: “Kofink visited me today, I will probably be able to use him. He will phone you soon and have news for Mr. Spatz. I am Mr. Spatz. When this is the case, would you please inform me immediately by telephone .”17 Spatz, meaning a sparrow garrulously hopping from one place to another, was the name von Dincklage jokingly gave himself with French friends.

  The Brown Network goes on to say that “every legation has its Dincklage. Gangster, profiteer, Gestapo agent—this admixture characterizes Hitler’s diplomats . . . His reports show the many lines along which foreign propagandist activity is conducted, and how these lines converge at one common point: espionage.”18 In page after page, von Dincklage details observations, connections and suggestions for his Nazi masters. He talks of his “large French circle” and says that “day by day this circle grows” and, through it, he hopes to be able to carry out his “social mission most satisfactorily.”19

  Although this extraordinary book was first published in German, French-and English-language editions were published in 1936 and gradually those in Paris got word of it. This exposé of von Dincklage’s activities must have unsettled him a great deal. While he was a master at deception and duplicity, and would have been most convincing in his persuasion that The Brown Network was a scurrilous fabrication, the episode cannot but have been a serious bar to his promotion to the highest ranks of Nazi espionage.

  Understandably, after the book’s publication, von Dincklage absented himself from Paris for some months. During this period, he persuaded Catsy that he must divorce her. Their divorce papers don’t give the real reason—in other words, Maximiliana von Schoenebeck’s Jewishness—instead, the cause is stated as their failure to have children.20 Von Dincklage returned to France, and although Catsy felt bitter and still cared for him, she agreed to keep their divorce a secret.21 In Paris, while her ex-husband continued at the fine addresses where he always managed to live, he also maintained his extensive reputation as a Don Juan. Marriage had in no way held up the progress of von Dincklage’s conquests; it had simply given them an extra frisson. And he now asked Alex Liberman if he would introduce him to Comtesse Hélène Dessoffy.

  Hélène Dessoffy and her husband, Jacques, “had enough money never to need to work, and channelled most of their energies into buying and redecorating their houses. Hélène was the daughter of a high-ranking naval officer, a horsy, long-legged, chain-smoking woman with . . . a wry, swift wit.”22 Wasting no time, von Dincklage was soon launched into “a torrid affair” with her. Unknown to Hélène Dessoffy, when her lover traveled south to spend time with her at Sanary (she and her husband lived “rather separate lives and usually inhabited separate villas”23), he would also visit his ex-wife nearby. At the same time, von Dincklage continued his long-term surveillance of the Jews of Sanary and the French naval port of Toulon across the hill. Now that he was divorced, his affair with Hélène Dessoffy gave him another alibi for being in the south.24

  While the above narrative gives some insight into von Dincklage’s character and his multifarious activities, he continued to charm and amuse his way into the lives of an expanding Parisian circle, and we find the odd tantalizing glimpses of him in the late thirties. Here also we discover some of the conflicting information that would later circulate about both von Dincklage and Gabrielle. Remembering that von Dincklage wanted his divorce kept secret, the following is at first puzzling: “Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage was celebrating his recent divorce by practically living in the bar at the Ritz, where he clearly demonstrated his expertise with women, wine, food and cigars . . . He flitted about, making friends, telling the latest jokes.”25

  On one occasion, the manager of the hotel was outraged and told von Dincklage to leave his office when he attempted to organize a black-market deal with the hotel to buy German wines. He had said it was “at the request of our mutual friend Joachim von Ribbentrop. You know of course, how important he now is in my government, the Third Reich.” The manager was furious and expelled him from his office. He told his wife that von Dincklage was “free to move around the hotel where I cannot stop him. But I can stop him from access to the offices and the cellars!” He then said to her: “Don’t think I’m suffering from paranoia when I tell you the invasion of France has already begun. That man is a spy!”26 As Germany’s power had grown, von Dincklage presumably felt less concerned about his divorce’s becoming public, which explains his celebration of it at the Ritz.

  After the 1938 signing of the Munich pact, when Italy, France and Britain permitted Germany to annex the Sudetenland—effectively allowing it to take over Czechoslovakia—those Jews with enough foresight acted promptly. These included Alex Liberman, who advised all his friends in Paris to cut off relations with von Dincklage and any German nationals whom they knew in France. Liberman had alerted Hélène Dessoffy to the fact that von Dincklage might well be a German spy. On Liberman’s advice, with great reluctance, she ended her affair with von Dincklage. Liberman’s suspicion was now acknowledged by Hélène Dessoffy’s friends, and she was both furious at von Dincklage’s duplicity and depressed at losing her lover.27

  According to a Swiss report quoting French intelligence,28 in 1938, von Dincklage was ordered to leave France because he had been “burned” by the Deuxième Bureau. (Although The Brown Network had appeared almost three years earlier, at the time, many of the implicated agents must have convinced the French that it was simply anti-German propaganda.) Von Dincklage, however, soon slipped back into France. At the outbreak of war, he was once again banished, and again went to Switzerland. Until France was occupied, he shuttled back and forth between France and Switzerland, regularly thrown out under suspicion. Continuing surveillance, the Swiss next discovered von Dincklage at a clinic “to cure his nerves,” but noted, “This fact is symptomatic because it is now well-known that German spies have recently adopted this system to escape police control more easily.”29

  Shortly after the German occupation of Paris, in 1940, we find von Dincklage again ensconced in his favorite city, this time having acqu
ired the house of one of his most recent lovers, a wealthy Jewish woman who had fled with her husband to the unoccupied south. Police reports confirm that sometime between April and November 1940, von Dincklage had become a “civil servant” in charge of pricing for the textile department of the German military administration in Paris, the MBF. No doubt this cover came about through the auspices of Theodor Momm.30

  Shortly after the armistice, in June 1940, when half of Paris, and Gabrielle, took flight in the exodus, Alex Liberman’s Russian lover and future wife, Tatiana du Plessix, also fled to the occupied zone with her small daughter. They eventually met up with Liberman and waited nervously for visas for America. In the meantime, the intrepid Tatiana decided she must make the hazardous trip back to Paris to gather crucial papers and possessions. Lying to Liberman, who would have forbidden her from making the trip had he known, Tatiana said she was going to Vichy to settle the papers of her recently deceased husband, a Resistance hero. She then made the journey into Paris in the back of a truck, hidden under some mattresses. Travel in and out of the capital was strictly controlled; however, charging large sums, underground groups transported people back and forth.

  Halfway through Tatiana’s assignment, walking down the avenue Kléber, she was startled to hear a man calling out her name. Turning, she saw von Dincklage, dressed as an officer, and climbing out of a Mercedes. As we saw, almost no one but German officers drove cars. When Tatiana asked von Dincklage:“What are you doing here?” he replied: