Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War

by Hal Vaughan

  THE COUNTDOWN to the blitzkrieg of France was nearing zero hour when Dincklage and Major Waag left Switzerland for Berlin. They would soon show up in Paris seemingly from nowhere and back into the lives of people who had once befriended them.

  On the night of Monday—Tuesday, May 10–11, 1940, Berlin was blacked out. Despite the curfew, a Time magazine correspondent reported that Adolf Hitler, Field Marshal Hermann Göring, and Dr. Joseph Goebbels were, unusually, all seen together that evening at a Berlin theater. When morning broke on Tuesday, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, looking pale and bleary-eyed after a sleepless night, told newsmen at a hastily assembled 8 a.m. press conference, “England and France at last dropped the mask.” Belgium and Holland had “plotted” against the Reich, he rasped. Everyone in the press room knew that the German war machine had finally struck against France and the small neutrals.

  Minutes later all Europe heard the smooth radio voice of Dr. Goebbels as he announced that “Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg had been taken under protection by the Reich.” In banner headlines, Berlin newspapers announced, “Germany has become the protector of the endangered and oppressed continent.” Broadcasting from the German Rundfunk in Berlin, William L. Shirer, now the CBS News correspondent in Berlin, broke the news to the United States that Hitler had “marched into” Holland and Belgium. Like a great scythe, an armada of tanks and mechanized infantry swept aside Dutch and Belgian troops as Panzer units maneuvered through the dense Ardennes forest to crush French border outposts. Above Rotterdam, German parachute units floated down to capture strategic points. Specially trained Wehrmacht troopers blasted open sectors of the Maginot Line. Hitler’s orders to his army and navy were clear: “The hour for the decisive battle for the future of the German nation has come … The battle will decide the future of the German peoples for the next one-thousand years.”

  Holland and Belgium surrendered. As German armies approached the Channel, British and French troops began evacuating France at Dunkirk on the North Sea beaches. According to Shirer, “Most people here in Berlin think that Hitler will try now to conquer England—maybe he’ll try to finish France first.”

  Panic seized Paris. Carmel Snow wrote in Harper’s Bazaar that the city had already become “an empty city. The taxis disappeared. All the telephones were cut. You can walk for miles without seeing a child. Even the dogs—and you know how Parisians love their dogs—have been sent away.” At the Ritz, manager Elmiger soon realized the situation was desperate. Chanel must have heard the tragedy unfold on French radio and on the BBC. From London came the news that four million French men, women, and children, along with Belgian refugees, were fleeing south before the German armies.

  Chanel hesitated. Her nights were filled with terrifying shadows. She eased fretfully into sleep with a dose of morphine from the syringe she kept by her bedside. Alone now, she desperately searched for a reliable man to replace the chauffeur who had been mobilized. Did she try to call Westminster in London? A news blackout added to the anxiety. From her window on Place Vendôme, Chanel could see “clouds of black smoke darkening the sky—at three in the afternoon it was like nightfall as bits of charred paper covered the city’s streets.” People imagined the Germans were burning everything before them; but no—the Germans were hours away. The black smoke came from the burning of oil storage tanks and cartons and paper as diplomatic missions and French ministries torched their documents.

  Clare Boothe Luce was listening to jazz on the radio that day in Paris when she heard the music stop, and then a crackling, raspy announcement: “We are bringing you the message of Pius XII.” In a trembling voice the new pontiff—he had just been elected pope in March 1939—pleaded for the Belgian people.

  Few Parisians imagined how rapidly German organization, modern communications, and a blitzkrieg attack could overrun the French defenses. By June 10, 1940, the Allied armies had been routed. Ever the agile scavenger, Mussolini declared war on France.

  ON JUNE 11, Paris was declared an open city. Chanel’s friend, U.S. Ambassador William C. Bullitt, was seen at Notre Dame Cathedral weeping before the altar. Like most Parisians, Chanel was now desperate to get out of town. No one knew if Paris would be bombed or devastated by the Wehrmacht steamroller. Chanel made arrangements for Mme Angèle Aubert, her right hand for thirty-some years; her chief seamstress, Manon; and a handful of other employees to go to the Palasse residence at the château at Corbère, near Pau. She packed up and left her trunks with the Ritz porter. A newly found chauffeur-bodyguard refused to drive the blue Rolls-Royce through swelling crowds of refugees. A Cadillac was found, and Chanel left Paris driving south through desperate masses, leaving behind the ominous clouds of thick, black smoke. She knew where she wanted to be: with the Palasse family across the Pyrenees at Corbère, near where her first lover, Étienne Balsan, had retired and where she was sure she could find a momentary peace.

  SEVEN

  PARIS OCCUPIED—

  CHANEL A REFUGEE

  For a woman betrayal has no sense—one cannot betray one’s passions.

  —GABRIELLE CHANEL

  AN EERIE SILENCE descended over the Paris Chanel had left behind. French ministries had burned their codebooks, locked their offices, and joined the stream of refugees fleeing south. Clouds of oily black smoke drifted over the slate-gray Seine; churches, monuments, and parks were deserted; cafe life was extinguished. All communications had been cut—as if some dreadful cataclysmic event had suspended life.

  William C. Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris, cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The airplane has proved to be the decisive weapon of war … the French had nothing to oppose [the Germans] but their courage … It was certain that Italy would enter the war and Marshal Philippe Pétain would do his utmost to come to terms immediately with Germany.”

  Seven weeks after German troops first entered France, the Nazi swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower. A few days later, Adolf Hitler was in Paris as his Wehrmacht troopers goose-stepped triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées. CBS correspondent William L. Shirer reported from Paris:

  The streets are utterly deserted, the stores closed, the protective shutters down tight over all the windows—the emptiness of the city got to you … I have the feeling that what I have seen here is the complete breakdown of French society: a collapse of the French Army, of Government, of the morale of the people. It is almost too tremendous to believe … Petain surrendering! What does it mean? And no one appeared to have the heart for an answer.

  CHANEL’S TRIP from Paris to Corbère, located near Pau, was laborious and sometimes hair-raising as her chauffeur, Larcher, drove south—inching from town to town, seeking safe passage. Hitler’s Panzer tanks were already in the French heartland, and dive-bombers strafed columns of refugees seeking shelter along the narrow tree-lined roads. The advancing German forces had forced millions of desperate citizens to take to the roads of northern France on foot in overloaded autos, trucks, and horse-drawn wagons. Their baggage, spare tires, and mattresses were piled every which way.

  At Corbère, André Palasse’s wife, Katharina, and children waited anxiously for news from Auntie Coco. The family had had no information from soldier Palasse for weeks. As the tragic hours of France’s defeat slipped by, they feared the worst. For Chanel, the Palasse château would be a temporary haven, isolated in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It was near Doumy, the home of Étienne Balsan, and she could count on his help.

  No one knew where the Germans would stop. French radio correspondents continued to tell how British and French troops were fleeing French soil at Dunkirk, headed for refuge in England. From Paris, CBS radio correspondent Eric Sevareid reported, “No American after tonight will be broadcasting directly to America, unless it is under supervision of men other than the French.” A French government had assembled in Bordeaux from where Prime Minister Paul Reynaud and Charles de Gaulle hoped to fight on. But they failed. Eighty-four-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain wanted the w
ar stopped, and Reynaud resigned. General de Gaulle fled to London. Marshal Pétain now took over what was left of France and its vast overseas empire. By mid-June 1940, the hero of the World War I battle at Verdun had asked the Germans for an armistice. Soon he would establish a regime at Vichy bent on collaboration with the Nazis. “Collaborator,” a mundane term, would become the most highly charged word in the political vocabulary of occupied France. A Time magazine correspondent observed: “The best the French could hope for was to be allowed to live in peace in Adolf Hitler’s Europe.”

  AFTER CHANEL AND LARCHER crossed the river Garonne at Agen, they found the roads less encumbered. In the foothills of the Pyrenees, at Doumy, they turned east onto country roads to find the Palasse château at Corbère. Katharina (Dutch-born Katharina Palasse, née Vanderzee), Étienne Balsan and his wife, and Chanel’s grand-nieces, fourteen-year-old Gabrielle and Hélène, twelve, were “wildly relieved” to see Chanel—their benefactor for years. Grand-niece Gabrielle was Chanel’s favorite, a vivacious child with a mind of her own. “Uncle Benny,” the Duke of Westminster, had nicknamed her “Tiny” because she was so petite. The name stuck.

  The family reunion at Corbère was full of drama and pathos. News of André arrived via the International Committee of the Red Cross: he was alive, captured in one of the Maginot Line forts along with some 300,000 other French troops who had been sent to prisoner-of-war camps in Germany. The Palasse family was relieved. Surely he would be home soon, Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie remembers thinking. “The war would be over, Papa would come home.” A few days later Angèle Aubert, Manon, and some ten other Chanel employees arrived from Paris, joining a group of Chanel’s friends, all refugees from the City of Light. Later, Marie-Louise Bousquet, an intimate friend of Misia Sert, arrived from nearby Pau. Life at the château was a break from the chaos of Paris. Food was plentiful, the property’s vineyards produced delightful amber white vin du pays, and Marie, the Pal asses’ cook, served the family’s table well. From time to time a small group gathered. Katharina, Chanel, the Balsans, and Marie-Louise Bousquet dined together. The children ate earlier. Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie remembers: “At home, children were to be seen and not heard.” Madame Aubert, Manon, and the other Chanel employees lived and dined in an annex to the château. But Tiny, Chanel’s favorite, had breakfast with Auntie Coco in her room.

  Chanel’s favorite grand-niece, Gabrielle Palasse, seen here at eleven or twelve years of age in the library of the Palasse home at Corbère on the eve of World War II. During the war, Mlle Palasse met Baron von Dincklage in Paris. (illustration credit 7.1)

  Just after noon on June 17, French radio interrupted its usual broadcast. At the Palasse château that Monday and all over Europe and Britain, people listened as Marshal Pétain announced France was surrendering—asking Hitler for armistice terms. “You, the French people, must follow me without reservation on the paths of honor and national interest. I make a gift of myself to France to lessen her misfortune. I think of the unhappy refugees on our roads … for them I have only compassion … it is with a heavy heart that I tell you that today we must stop fighting.”

  Chanel was aghast. She went to her room and wept. Gabrielle remembered, “When she learned France had been defeated, Auntie Coco was inconsolable for days. She called it a betrayal.” After the debacle of May–June 1940 and with the occupation of France it was common for French men and women to believe they were betrayed by corrupt politicians and military leaders. That feeling would give way to confidence in French hero Marshal Philippe Pétain when he took over the Vichy government.

  In the weeks that followed, the family learned that General de Gaulle had made a broadcast to France from the London BBC. Slowly and often clandestinely via pamphlets distributed by anti-Nazis, French men and women heard of de Gaulle’s June 18, 1940, appeal to French citizens everywhere: “France has lost a battle but not a war. The flame of resistance must not die, will not die …” But in 1940 few in France knew who the fifty-year-old general was. Only later, through BBC broadcasts from London, would they come to know of a Free French movement headed by de Gaulle and based in London. In 1940 only a handful of French officers joined de Gaulle’s resistance movement. De Gaulle made few friends when he tagged Marshal Pétain “the shipwreck of France.” A French soldier listening to de Gaulle’s broadcast in a cafe remarked, “This guy is breaking our balls.”

  André Palasse, Chanel’s nephew, in Paris before World War II. He was captured on the Maginot Line in 1940 and interned in a German stalag. Chanel managed to secure André’s freedom by cooperating with the German Abwehr spy organization. (illustration credit 7.2)

  Marshal Pétain stripped General de Gaulle, his former protégé, of all rank, removing him from the rolls of the army he had served his entire adult life. De Gaulle was then sentenced to death for treason. For many French men and women the surrender was a relief; France would be spared the bloodletting of 1914–1918. With Pétain in power most French and European politicians believed “Better Hitler than Stalin”—and they hoped that Hitler would turn against the Soviet Union.

  As the summer wound down, Chanel wanted to return to Paris where her perfume business needed her attention; after all, she said later, “The Germans weren’t all gangsters.”

  ON JUNE 22, 1940, the Nazi propaganda machine offered radio listeners a minute-by-minute humiliating description of France’s defeat, broadcasting the details of the signing of the armistice agreement. Indeed, twenty-two years earlier, at the same railroad siding in the Compiègne forest clearing at Rethondes, the French had taken Germany’s surrender. On a breezy Saturday morning French General Charles Huntziger signed France’s capitulation in front of ranking German officers, making France a vassal of Germany. Hitler, Göring, Ribbentrop, and Rudolf Hess were there as was Dincklage’s mentor General Walther von Brauchitsch. William L. Shirer, covering the event for CBS News, told listeners in America of Hitler’s look of “scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.”

  In thirty-eight days, the leader of the Third Reich had achieved what the kaiser’s German army had failed to gain in the four years of bloody war in 1914–1918 that had cost millions of lives. Hitler had realized a German dream: Paris was at his feet.

  After the signing of the armistice at Rethondes Hitler drove to Paris. There, the world’s newsreels captured the führer strutting up the steps of the Palais de Chaillot at the Trocadéro. The movie cameras panned slowly over the German conquests: the Eiffel Tower with its Nazi swastika floating in the breeze, the gardens of the Champ de Mars, and the nearly eight-hundred-year-old twin towers of Notre Dame Cathedral. If one could believe Nazi propaganda, Great Britain was to be next on the Reich führer’s menu.

  THE ARMISTICE DIVIDED France into la zone occupée and zone non occupée (or zone libre), terms the French would soon label zone O and zone nono. France’s new masters created a line of demarcation between north and south—an absolute foreign boundary, a major barrier to the movement of people, and an impediment to business and commerce. Beginning in June 1940, French citizens would have to apply for a laissez-passer or ausweis to travel between zones. Laissez-passer were never issued automatically; they were a privilege closely supervised by the Gestapo. Even Pétain’s ministers had to ask German permission to travel from Vichy to Paris. For the French people, the line of demarcation was a humiliating nightmare.

  Sixteen days after France capitulated, Prime Minister Churchill, fearing the French fleet would fall into German hands, ordered a British fleet to sink French warships based at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria where masses of French vessels lay at anchor. Thirteen hundred French sailors perished; scores were wounded. It was a national dishonor—seen as a treacherous act by a former ally. For Marshal Pétain and his Anglophobic ministers, it was an excuse to end diplomatic relations with Britain. Pétain now declared that the nation was to have a “National Revolution” dedicated to “Work, Family and Fatherland.” Britain blockaded French ports as Hitler’s war staff planned to cross the
English Channel and crush England. The Battle for Britain had begun.

  Vichy, Marshal Pétain’s new headquarters, was now in the hands of men who wanted to share in a European “New Order” under Hitler. They were convinced that Germany would defeat Britain and create a powerful force against Communism and international Jewry. Soon, the Nazis forced Pétain to appoint the rabid anti-Communist and anti-Semite Pierre Laval as deputy prime minister. Barely three months after Pétain signed an armistice agreement with the Nazis, his Vichy ministers had prepared a first “Statute on Jews.” Pétain not only approved the law but in his own hand added restrictions on Jews in unoccupied France: defining who were Jews and banning Jews from high public service positions (physicians and lawyers, for example) that might influence public opinion. The Statute became law on October 3, 1940, three weeks before the Germans issued a similar law in Paris and the occupied zone. The thesis that Pétain was manipulated by his anti-Semitic Vichy entourage was a myth.

  If Vichy was now the seat of French power in the unoccupied zone, Chanel wanted to go there. She was determined to return to Paris by way of Vichy. She knew Pierre Laval, now Pétain’s senior minister, through his daughter, Josée Laval de Chambrun (the wife of Chanel’s lawyer, René de Chambrun), and a handful of Vichy ministers’ wives—former clients and friends in Paris and Deauville.