by Hal Vaughan
Josée raved when describing an Abetz evening: “Champagne flowed, and the German officers, dressed in white tie and splendid uniforms, spoke only French. Social life had returned with friends and our new guests, the Germans.”
Josée was ebullient about a Christmas gala held in 1940—the first year of the German occupation and a tense moment for Parisians. The Germans had just executed twenty-eight-year-old Jacques Bonsergent at Mont Valérien outside the walls of Paris—the first Parisian civilian to face a German firing squad. But for Josée,
in a blacked-out Paris there was gaiety. Abetz in a uniform half-civil and half-military [Abetz held the rank of an SS lieutenant-colonel] and his wife Suzanne turned about a magnificent buffet dinner while the overweight German Consul in Paris, General Rudolf Schleier, bowed low to the ladies, kissing their hands as did Luftwaffe General Hanesse, dressed in a white uniform—his chest covered with decorations. [Presumably, General Hanesse’s decorations were awarded for killing the French.] The Champagne flowed; the German officers, particularly the pilots, in evening dress did honor to the ladies, moving like butterflies, and no one spoke German. It was a real French gala evening when speaking German was prohibited. The officers competed to be most erudite in the language of Rabelais [French sixteenth-century satirist] … No one thought about the war. We all thought that peace, a definitive peace, a German peace would win over the world with the approval of Stalin and Roosevelt … only England continued to face the Germans.
IN CONTRAST, the daily life of an average Parisian was one of hardship during the coldest winter on record—and each succeeding winter seemed colder. There would be no Champagne soirees for them. Coal for fuel was rare, gas supplies paltry, and electricity frequently cut off. Petrol for automobiles was sometimes available on the black market, but most automobile engines were converted to run on natural gas—two bottles on top of the cars. Some transformed their motorcars to burn charcoal. As the months of occupation passed, things got tighter and tighter.
Within weeks of the German arrival in Paris, everything was snatched from the marketplace to be resold later for two to three times its original price. Within months, the Germans had imposed a regime of virtual starvation on the population. Field Marshal Göring decreed that the French people would have to subsist on 1,200 calories a day—half the number of calories the average working man or woman needed to survive. The elderly were rationed to 850 calories a day. The measures were staggering.
Every commodity was rationed. It was the old folks who suffered the most and risked serious illness or death from hypothermia or undernourishment when they couldn’t keep their apartments warm in the long, cold, wet months of the war years. The American Hospital at Neuilly, still run by an American physician, and Otto Gresser, a Swiss manager, were able to supplement their patients’ diets by arranging for a wealthy French landowner to sell the hospital potatoes for a reasonable price. The foodstuffs were then transported to the hospital kitchen by ambulance. Gresser tells about bartering wine for more potatoes: “We had 250 patients … The French authorities allowed each patient one-half a liter [a pint] of wine per day and soon we had more wine than the patients could drink. The farmers, however, couldn’t get enough wine. We took 500 liters [almost a hundred gallons] of wine and bartered the wine for 5,000 kilos of fertilizer. One farmer gave us 10,000 kilos [about 22,000 pounds] of potatoes for the fertilizer … We gave 50 kilos of potatoes to each staff member and it was very important for them to feed their families.”
By late 1941, meat—desperately needed to fend off malnutrition—was almost impossible to find except at outrageous prices. Gresser remembers that when 300 kilos of beef, bought on the black market, was delivered to the hospital in a big “borrowed” German car, suspicious German authorities asked to inspect the hospital kitchen. The staff then hid the meat in the hospital’s garden.
Even the French staple, wine, was in short supply. In their book Wine and War, Don and Petie Kladstrup tell how wine production fell by half between 1939 and 1942. The Germans loved and knew about wines—particularly the wines of France. Their Weinführers managed to take away not only the best of the annual French production but also massive amounts of ordinary table wine for their armed forces. The Germans shipped more than 320 million bottles of wine to Germany each year at fixed prices.
Göring ordered the Weinführers to systematically ship even mediocre wine to Germany. The result was catastrophic. “The old and the ill needed wine,” French doctors advised German and French authorities. “It is an excellent food … it is easily digested … and a vital source of vitamins and minerals.”
EIGHT
DINCKLAGE MEETS HITLER;
CHANEL BECOMES AN
ABWEHR AGENT
À la guerre comme à la guerre.
—FRENCH PROVERB
IN EARLY 1941, Dincklage left Chanel in Paris. He traveled to Berlin with Baron Louis de Vaufreland. The two men had met in prewar Paris when Dincklage was “the lover of Madame Esnault Pelterie,” the wife of a prewar French aviation pioneer.
In Berlin, Dincklage was singularly honored. He was received personally by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister and Dincklage’s chief when Spatz was at the German Embassy in Paris in 1934. The text of a French counterintelligence report of Dincklage’s meeting with the führer tells about his role as a senior French clandestine agent: “Von D [Dincklage] lived before the war in Paris at rue des Sablons. He said he was Swedish but in reality is German … in Berlin he had an audience with Hitler and Goebbels. He is also very close to [German army commander] von Brauchitsch.”
Dincklage must have found Berlin in a triumphant mood that winter of 1941. German armies had by now run over Western Europe, and Hitler’s Wehrmacht was on its way to conquering Yugoslavia and Greece. Secretly, Hitler was preparing to attack the Soviet Union in the coming spring.
French document (certified reproduction) revealing French Abwehr agent Vaufreland was “an intimate friend of Chanel.” (illustration credit 8.1)
We know nothing of what Vaufreland did in Berlin during the trip with Dincklage. However, a document in the archives of the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), de Gaulle’s counterintelligence service in London, tells how after Berlin, “Louis de Vaufreland was sent to Tunisia, posing as an Alsatian and using the alias, de Richmond.” Though Vaufreland’s trip is clouded in secrecy, it could hardly have been coincidental that Tunisia had been Dincklage’s old Abwehr hunting grounds when he worked among Muslims. The report went on: “D [Dincklage] is [now] on very bad terms with Abetz … he claims Abetz stole 200 million French francs [about $90 million in 2010]. This colossal sum was shared with Pierre Laval; for it was Laval who arranged that the Yugoslavian French-owned Bor mines be turned over to Nazi Germany.”
Dincklage’s protégé, Baron Louis de Vaufreland, was a trusted German agent who went to Madrid with Chanel in 1941 and later introduced Chanel to senior Nazi officials in Paris. (illustration credit 8.2)
Being received by Hitler was, indeed, an honor for an Abwehr officer, and Dincklage returned to Paris under orders to work directly for Berlin. Dincklage had become an influential and senior officer of the Abwehr. Meanwhile, Vaufreland had earned the title of a V-Mann, meaning that he was now a trusted Abwehr agent, code name “Piscatory,” Agent No. F-7667. (V-Mann is also an appellation for trusted Gestapo agents.)
Dincklage now arranged to have Vaufreland meet Chanel. Their first meeting took place so casually that Chanel might not have immediately realized that the coming adventure had been set up by Dincklage.
Police intelligence report showing Chanel’s Abwehr agent number and code name. (illustration credit 8.3)
EVER INVENTIVE and opportunistic, Chanel thought she knew how to navigate through Nazi-occupied Paris and how to arrange the release of her nephew André Palasse from a German prisoner-of-war camp so he could safely be returned to her side. It was an urgent matter. She had learned from Corbère that André m
ight have contracted tuberculosis. The Abwehr was well aware of Chanel’s anxiety over André’s fate. They would help Chanel—for a price. Chanel was the perfect target for recruitment by the Germans: she needed something the Abwehr could supply, and she had powerful connections in London, neutral Spain, and Paris.
Chanel and Dincklage paid a brief visit to La Pausa at Roquebrune, free to travel between zones of occupation thanks to Dincklage’s authority. When they returned to Paris, a Chanel-Vaufreland meeting was arranged at the Ritz.
Soon, Vaufreland had convinced Chanel that through his German friends, he could arrange André’s freedom from the German stalag and his return to Paris. Vaufreland also intimated that his German friends could help her wrest control of the Chanel perfume business from the hands of the Wertheimers or their proxies.
Vaufreland and Chanel made an unlikely pair of agents. The baron, who dressed like an effete dandy, was openly homosexual. A London Free French report described Vaufreland at the time as “a 39-year-old, blondish-red head, aristocrat-playboy (alias, Pescatori [sic]), Marquis d’Awyigo, de Richmond).” Another French intelligence report called him a “pudgy homosexual of medium height always impeccably dressed” and “an Abwehr agent being run by Abwehr lieutenant Hermann Neubauer—[Vaufreland was] in need of large sums of money, intelligent and well spoken and fluent in English, German, Italian and Spanish … an extremely dangerous German spy.” The report goes on: “In 1940 Vaufreland worked as a Gestapo agent in Morocco before joining the Paris Abwehr.” Later, another Free French report stated that by the time Vaufreland met Chanel, he had been responsible for the arrest of a team of French Gaullist resistance fighters in Casablanca.
Vaufreland’s Abwehr boss, Neubauer, soon stepped into the picture to close the deal with Chanel. Neubauer must have known Dincklage. His office, like Dincklage’s, was located at the Abwehr-sequestered Hôtel Lutetia at 45, boulevard Raspail off of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Like Dincklage, he dressed in civilian clothes and spoke excellent French.
One of Chanel’s Abwehr contacts was Sonderführer Albert Notterman, seen here after the war when he worked for the U.S. Army, 1947. (illustration credit 8.4)
Sometime in the spring of 1941, Neubauer met Chanel with Vaufreland at her boutique-office on the rue Cambon. There, Neubauer assured her he would help free André if Chanel would consent to helping Germany obtain “political” information at Madrid.
Chanel was delighted with the idea of a trip to Spain. According to Vaufreland’s later testimony to a French judge, Chanel had “adroitly suggested she needed a visa to travel to Spain and make a trip to England, so she could give her important friends economic and political information.”
With this, Vaufreland said, “Neubauer was won over.”
SOMETIME IN 1941, the Abwehr enrolled Gabrielle Chanel in their Berlin registry as Agent F-7124, code name Westminster. One has to wonder: Who might have thought to use Bendor’s ducal title for a code name? Was it Dincklage, acting behind the scenes, who slipped this reference to Chanel’s former lover into her record? (After the war, Chanel denied she knew anything about these matters.)
Agent Neubauer now took matters in hand. Chanel and Vaufreland left Paris on a hot and muggy evening, August 5, 1941. They traveled to Spain by train via the French border crossing at Hendaye. The night before, the Abwehr office in Paris cabled the German police at Hendaye: “Leaving Paris at 20:10 hours, August 5, 1941, arriving Hendaye, August 6 about 9:11 hours, [are]—the Baron Giscatory [sic] de Vaufreland, holding French passport No. 3284 delivered at Casablanca, and Gabrielle Chanel, holding French passport No. 18348, delivered in Paris. Treat these two passengers with consideration, accord them all facility and spare them any problems.” The telegram is signed, “Abwehr Bureau Paris, No. 695 L/7.41 g IIIF.” (Roman numeral three “F” refers to the Abwehr foreign counterintelligence service.)
The Spanish-speaking Vaufreland was well suited to his mission, with close family ties in Madrid through his aristocratic Spanish aunt. French and British files described the initiative as part of an ongoing German military intelligence effort to recruit new agents willing to serve Germany. The trip also suited Chanel’s own interests. She expected to bring her nephew, André, home. And while in Madrid, she could improve the sales of Chanel No. 5 in the Spanish market.
In Madrid, Chanel moved into a Ritz suite, living in prewar luxury while Vaufreland stayed in the city with friends. Franco’s World War II archives have all been destroyed, and it is impossible to reconstruct Chanel’s activities in the Spanish capital during August and September 1941. We do have from British archives a report of an evening Chanel and Vaufreland spent with the British diplomat Brian Wallace and his wife. Wallace, whose code name was “Ramon,” reported to London in detail a conversation he and his wife had with the couple at a Madrid dinner party. (Details of who hosted the party have not been uncovered. The British Embassy dispatch sent to London with the report of the conversation has not been found.) Wallace’s attachment to the British Embassy dispatch, No. 347 of August 22, 1941, is reproduced below with the deletion of insignificant remarks:
MI, COPY. ENCLOSURE TO MADRID DISPATCH NO. 347 OF 22 AUGUST 1941
Memorandum by Mr. Brian Wallace
(Report on conversation with Mlle Chanel and Baron Luis [sic] Vaufreland.)
On Wednesday, August 13th, my wife and I attended a dinner party amongst whom were Mlle Chanel and Baron Vaufreland [sic] (a Frenchman). The following is the joint result of our conversations.
VAUFRELAND: We have both known him some years (though not well) in Paris. He was a young man about town with strong Rightist sympathies and alleged to have homosexual tendencies. He was a liaison officer with the Grenadier Guards and the Inniskilling Dragoons, and was evacuated from Dunkirk on June 2nd. He is half Spanish, and a nephew of the Duchess of Almazan. He has come to Spain as a handyman for Mlle Chanel (with whom he scraped an acquaintance recently in Paris). Personally he is an unreliable person …
Both Vaufreland and Chanel warned us about the French Embassy here, especially the Ambassador and his wife, whom they claimed was “anti-British.”
MLLE CHANEL: She talked for nearly three hours very frankly about Paris, and impressed me deeply with her sincerity. She is a friend of the P.M.’s and is obviously greatly attached to the Duke of Westminster. She would like to go to England but cannot bring herself to abandon France. Her stated reason for coming here (or rather going to Portugal) is that she couldn’t stand Paris any longer and has to have a holiday. The main subject she talked on was Parisians. Her chief points were as follows:
1. The Germans cannot understand the French and this is making them hate the French to the point that she, Mlle Chanel, is afraid of what will happen.
2. The French all the time “rigole” [laugh] and “fait des blagues [tell jokes].” They are pinpricks, but they have worked the Germans to a state of fury. So much has been done in the Metro, twisting tickets into “V’s,” and later in “H’s” (for Hitler), scribbling on walls etc. that the Germans have threatened to close the Metro.
3. The French affect extreme gaiety. “Why,” the Germans ask, “when you have lost the war are you so gay?” “Why,” the Parisians retort, “when you have won the war are you so sad?”
4. In the occupied zone the people are not pro-British; only anti-German.
5. France is slowly being transformed into two countries. Those in the un-occupied zone seem to think that those in the occupied zone are there at their own wish.
6. Very few Frenchmen realize that they have lost the war. “You wait until we have got rid of these swine,” they say, and, “If you point out that France has been defeated they accuse you of being anti-French and talk vaguely of rising and English help.”
7. The Germans are bitterly anti-French but generally rather pro-English (in that they have a great admiration for all that is British).
8. The Germans hate and fear Churchill and divide England into Churchill and the rest. The latter they a
re convinced want peace; the former to exterminate Germany.
9. There is great lack of coordination among the Germans particularly between the civil and the military authorities, who hate one another and delight in undoing the other’s arrangements. They are all frightened, they are all wretched, and the watchers are themselves watched.
10. There is a separate [German] commercial organization and this is extremely active—Chanel gives a particularly grave warning about this: “They are buying themselves into every business, covering it up in many ways so that when peace comes it is going to be extremely difficult to weed all the German interests out.”
11. Summing up, Chanel said that France even now doesn’t know what hit her. She is still in a daze, but has already come to sufficiently move her eyes and see what is going on around her. Soon she will recover the use of her limbs and then the trouble will start. They have tried passing the whole thing over, but it is still there. There is perplexity and mounting impotent rage among the Germans and a growing realization of their true position among the French.