Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War

by Hal Vaughan

  Sgd: BRIAN WALLACE, 21st August 1941

  Note: They were both leaving for Lisbon for about two weeks on Wednesday the 20th.

  CHANEL AND VAUFRELAND never went to Portugal. They returned to Paris sometime in the late fall or early winter of 1941. There, Chanel discovered that André Palasse had been returned to France—safely, but ailing. And by then the French intelligence services in London had noted in their files that Vaufreland was “an intimate friend of Chanel’s.”

  With André free, Chanel now concentrated on her perfume business. She would use her status as an Aryan French citizen to get back what she believed “was stolen” from her by the Wertheimers.

  For the next twelve months Vaufreland would assist Chanel in her efforts to convince the Nazis that Chanel’s No. 5 perfume business, sold to the Jewish Wertheimer family in 1924, rightfully belonged in Chanel’s hands. Vaufreland arranged for Chanel to meet the senior Nazi official who administered the laws concerning the “Aryanization” of Jewish property. Chanel’s principal biographer in France, Edmonde Charles-Roux, described Chanel’s efforts to recover her perfume franchise: “Now it was [Chanel’s] turn to play the exploited … and the Wertheimer clan would see what she was made of. She was Aryan and they weren’t. She was in France and they were in the United States. Emigrants … Jews. In the eyes of the occupying power, in short, she alone existed.”

  NINE

  CHECKMATED BY THE

  WERTHEIMERS

  War or peace she lived … entrenched in her fortress.

  —MARCEL HAEDRICH, COCO CHANEL:

  HER LIFE, HER SECRETS

  AS 1941 CAME TO A CLOSE, momentous news swept Europe.

  Japanese forces had attacked Pearl Harbor and within days Germany declared war on the United States. Winston Churchill was soon on his way to Washington to meet President Franklin Roosevelt. The two men mapped out an initial strategy to defeat Germany and Japan during this first American Christmas at war.

  In France, General de Gaulle’s Resistance networks began recruiting clandestine groups of domestic freedom fighters to sabotage German works and kill Nazis. The Germans called them “terrorists.” They would be remorselessly pursued and, when rounded up, their members were sometimes turned to work for the Nazis, tortured, or executed, and in some cases deported to extermination camps.

  WHEN CHANEL AND VAUFRELAND returned from Madrid in the early fall of 1941 Paris residents had lived through fourteen months of occupation. The German curfew enveloped Paris in evenings of silence. In a 1941 essay, Jean-Paul Sartre contrasted earlier “years with the chattering of Republican politics” to the present “Republic of Silence.” In the face of German occupation, much of the French public willingly abdicated their republican rights and accepted the allegedly benevolent dictatorship of Marshal Philippe Pétain. And most Frenchmen believed the old marshal had saved the nation from a greater catastrophe.

  Meanwhile, in Nazi Germany one of Hitler’s favorite SS leaders, Reinhard Heydrich, became the führer’s architect for the Nazi Final Solution. Heydrich’s assistant, Adolf Eichmann, set to work in the summer of 1941 to design methods for the physical extermination of Jews. In January 1942, at a conference at the Wannsee lake resort located outside Berlin, Heydrich and Eichmann laid down the modalities for implementing the Final Solution.

  At Vichy, in unoccupied France, Jews had already been banned from holding any position that might influence public opinion. Soon, they would be excluded from commerce and industry, their businesses and property confiscated. In Paris and throughout occupied France, non-French Jews—immigrants—were arrested and sent to deportation camps. Then all Jews in France would soon suffer the same fate: arrest and deportation to, and extermination in, SS-run concentration camps.

  The war was moving toward a dramatic conclusion in Europe. With the Axis powers now controlling Greece, Yugoslavia, and parts of North Africa, German Panzers launched a surprise attack across Russian borders on June 22, 1941. Later they would fail to defeat Stalin’s Red Army at Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad.

  In France, de Gaulle’s emerging Free French and Communist resistance fighters began attacking German soldiers and sailors at Bordeaux and Nantes. There German troopers were shot on the streets; while in Paris, a German naval officer was shot while waiting for a subway train.

  Retaliation was swift. Across the country, French hostages were shot by Wehrmacht firing squads.

  Nazi terror now mandated that all Jews older than six years of age wear a yellow Star of David with Juive or Juif stitched in black across it. The symbol was to be displayed over the heart on all clothing. Some eighty thousand Jews in Paris alone are known to have obeyed the law. The penalties for disobedience were harsh. (Homosexuals, Roma, political prisoners, and others were forced to wear different-colored triangles.) Then, from the summer of 1942 Parisians watched as Jews and Jewish refugees were arrested, destined for deportation. Hitler had ordered the complete destruction of the Jewish race.

  IN THE MIDDLE of this mayhem, Nazi Holocaust master Adolf Eichmann hesitated over the question of deporting French children younger than sixteen years of age. Vichy chief Pierre Laval stepped up. He sanctioned a telegram to Eichmann, who was then managing the Holocaust from Berlin. The telegram read: “Laval has proposed that children below the age of sixteen be included in the deportation of Jewish families from the free zone. The fate of Jewish children in the occupied zone does not interest him.” For many French, the European refugee Jews in France, indeed all Jews, had “ruined the good order of things.” Many citizens extolled the anti-Semitic laws being enforced by French administrators, French police, and the Nazis. One educated French woman, when seeing pictures of Jews being deported, remarked to the author, “But they are not French, they are Jews.”

  Chanel must have known about the round-up of Paris Jews. John Updike noted in the September 1998 issue of The New Yorker that “all the available evidence points to Chanel’s total indifference to the fate of her Jewish neighbors—or indeed the lesser deprivations and humiliations suffered by the vast majority of Parisians.” Updike reported that, at age fifty-eight, Chanel was seemingly “happy” living with her German lover. “Happy, in a world in which mountains of misfortune were rising around them … in the Jewish quarter, a fifteen-minute walk from the Ritz.”

  Chanel had no doubt that the Nazis meant business when it came to applying anti-Semitic laws against Jews and Aryanizing Jewish businesses and property. She had told Misia Sert around Christmas 1941 that with the Nazis in power she hoped to gain control of the firm now in the hands of the Wertheimer family, which had fled to the United States. Chanel and Dincklage must have calculated that if Hitler prevailed—and most of the world believed he would—Chanel would control an Aryanized Chanel No. 5 perfume company. The rewards to her would be immeasurable. As did many Germans and Englishmen, including Bendor, Duke of Westminster, Chanel and Dincklage must have hoped for a negotiated Anglo-German deal to end hostilities. They had profited from prewar trade with Germany, and they wanted commerce with Germany restored. They saw a deal with Hitler as an opportunity to reunite the German and English aristocracies. Few could forget how Hitler had promised to restore Chanel’s intimate friend, Edward, former king of the British Empire, now Duke of Windsor, to the British throne as king with his wife beside him. Indeed, if trade could be restored, Germany and Britain would become an international economic steamroller and Chanel’s stake in her No. 5 fragrance would become priceless.

  Chanel was reassured; the Abwehr had fulfilled its promise to free her nephew, André, who was now with his daughter Gabrielle in Paris being treated at Chanel’s expense for tuberculosis. Later, he would be cared for in Switzerland.

  As promised, Vaufreland now contacted his friend, a German official named Prince Ernst Ratibor-Corvey (also a friend of Dincklage). Ratibor-Corvey advised Vaufreland to arrange an appointment for Chanel with Dr. Kurt Blanke, who operated out of the Gestapo offices at the Hôtel Majestic where Blanke and his cowor
kers administered Nazi laws providing for the confiscation of Jewish property. Chanel sought Blanke’s help to Aryanize La Société des Parfums Chanel in her favor.

  With the occupation of France, the forty-year-old Blanke, a German lawyer and Nazi, had been appointed by Berlin to head the Paris office responsible for Entjudung, “the elimination of Jewish influence.” Until 1944 he played a key role in seizing Jewish assets—transferring Jewish-owned businesses and property into Aryan hands.

  Chanel and Blanke met at the Hôtel Majestic sometime in the early winter of 1941–1942. After speaking with him, Chanel believed she was one step closer to defeating the Wertheimers and getting full control of the Societé des Parfums Chanel. But she had woefully underestimated the foresight and shrewdness of the Wertheimer brothers. They had long ago devised a plan to save their business if the Nazis came to power in France.

  As early as 1936, with Hitler in power in Germany, the Wertheimer brothers believed that Germany intended to swallow Europe. The Jews of Europe were doomed. The Nazi invasion of the Rhineland that year confirmed their fears: war was inevitable. Kristallnacht, November 9–10, 1938—a night of attacks on Jews and Jewish property in Germany and Austria—convinced them that Hitler was determined to wipe out the Jewish race.

  At the end of World War I, when aviation was still in its infancy, the Wertheimers had entered into business with Félix Amiot, an aviation pioneer, becoming a minority shareholder in the Amiot aviation company. By 1934 Amiot was supplying bombers to the French air force, and the 370, the 350, and the 340 bomber aircraft were catching the eyes of German Luftwaffe engineers. In an effort to open the American market, Pierre Wertheimer traveled to New Orleans in 1939 to negotiate setting up an Amiot plant to assemble planes in the United States, but France’s declaration of war and the United States’ declared neutrality ended the project. Pierre returned to France to join his older brother Paul in organizing the emigration of the Wertheimer clan from France to America.

  In an August 1939 report the French Deuxième Bureau described how forty-three-year-old Félix Amiot, the president of SECM, a mechanical engineering firm that had manufactured bombers for the French air force since 1925, had received 50 million French francs (the 2010 equivalent of about $22 million) from the Wertheimers via a bank transfer from their account at the bank Manheimer Mendelsohn in France. There is no record of how these 50 million francs were invested. However, in the months to come, Amiot used his influence with Hitler’s right-hand man and commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, to shield the Wertheimers’ businesses in France.

  WITH GERMAN TROOPS streaming across France’s borders, the Wertheimers took refuge in the Chevreuse valley about 20 miles southwest of Paris. Just before fleeing, with German armies threatening Paris, Pierre Wertheimer and Amiot met at Pierre’s Paris apartment. Journalists Bruno Abescat and Yves Stavrides quote Amiot: “We said goodbye. Pierre asked me to help save what was possible and to look after his son Jacques who was in the military.” Félix Amiot, the forty-three-year-old Norman from a wealthy Cherbourg family, and the Wertheimers now made a secret pact: Amiot would take control of the French company La Société des Parfums Chanel, and hold the business in trust for the Wertheimers. (After the war the Wertheimers regained control of the French company but only after a legal battle with Amiot.)

  Paul and Pierre then assembled their families and fled to Brazil through Spain. Many months later, after obtaining U.S. visas for his family, Pierre and his wife, Germaine, sailed to New York aboard the SS Argentina. They reached Manhattan in the first week of August 1940. Paul, his wife, Madeleine, and their children Antoine and Mathilde, followed, landing in New York a few weeks later.

  The Wertheimers found a welcome refuge in the United States. Their money, unlimited resources, and their established reputation as reliable entrepreneurs guaranteed success in America. Paul and Pierre went about building a new life for their families: Paul in a handsome six-story brownstone at 35 West Seventy-fifth Street just off Central Park West, and Pierre at 784 Park Avenue. The brothers soon launched a new Bourjois perfume, Courage, designed to pull at the heartstrings of a sympathetic American public. After all, there were many Americans and a growing refugee population nostalgic for Paris and for France. They flocked to cinemas to see Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the hit film Casablanca and put the 1941 ballad “The Last Time I Saw Paris” on the hit parade.

  Sales of Courage soared. Later, the Wertheimers’ Hoboken, New Jersey, plant began production of the distinctive Chanel No. 5. The perfume was a success in North and South American markets. Later still, the Wertheimers exploited the lucrative U.S. domestic and overseas military post exchanges, known as PXs, to sell Chanel No. 5.

  From 1940 the Wertheimers became one of the earliest supporters of General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French and Jewish causes in New York. Their success infuriated Chanel.

  SOMETIME IN MID-AUGUST 1940 a German frontier guard watched “a big-boned, jagged-faced, giant of a man” advancing in a line of travelers to get police clearance at the Hendaye border crossing between Spain and France. When the German control officer examined the man’s passport, he learned that the bearer, Don Armando Guevaray Sotto Mayor, measured an impressive two meters in height (six feet, eight inches). After a tiresome series of questions and a minute search of the man’s luggage, Don Sotto Mayor was waved through police and customs. He then boarded the Hendaye-Paris train for the 500-mile (800-kilometer) trip to the Gare d’Austerlitz on Paris’s Left Bank.

  For posterity, H. Gregory Thomas places a Bourjois perfume sample in a vault at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. With the German occupation of Paris, Thomas, acting as a secret agent for the Wertheimer perfume barons, slipped into Paris as “Don Armando Guevaray Sotto Mayor” to steal the Chanel No. 5 perfume formula so the Bourjois firm could manufacture Chanel No. 5 perfume in the United States. After the war Thomas became president and then chairman of the Wertheimer firm. (illustration credit 9.1)

  Besides his height, the only thing out of the ordinary about Don Sotto Mayor was his identity. On that hot August day, the man en route to Paris was not actually Don Sotto Mayor but Herbert Gregory Thomas, a thirty-three-year-old American citizen and the son of Herbert Thomas of Brooklyn, New York, and Amanda Caskie of Boone County, Missouri. A vice president of the Wertheimer’s Bourjois perfume company in New York, Thomas had assumed the Don Sotto Mayor persona to carry out a series of secret missions in Europe for the Wertheimer family.

  Thomas had been educated in Switzerland. He graduated from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and held advanced law degrees from the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Salamanca in Spain. He had practiced international law in Paris, Geneva, and The Hague before moving to New York to work for the Guerlain fragrance enterprise. In 1939, he joined the Wertheimer-owned perfume manufacturing company, Bourjois, Inc.

  On that August day when he was leaving for Europe, Thomas met with the press at the Pan Am Clipper departure lounge at New York’s Municipal Airport (renamed LaGuardia in 1947). He told a New York Times reporter that he had resigned from Bourjois, Inc., and was now working for the Toilet Goods Association in New York. He said he was going to Europe to study conditions relative to the supply and shipment of raw materials and essential oils from France, Italy, and Switzerland. But that was far from the truth. Thomas had a number of objectives. First, posing as Don Sotto Mayor, he was to retrieve the chemical formula needed to produce Chanel No. 5 perfume. Second, he had to secure the key ingredients—“natural aromatics” such as jasmine—so that the signature perfume could be manufactured on site in Hoboken. Third, Thomas was to help Félix Amiot get twenty-nine-year-old Jacques Wertheimer, Pierre’s son, who was hiding in Bordeaux, out of France and to New York. Jacques had been mobilized in 1939. After France’s defeat, he escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp with the help of Félix Amiot.

  In 1942, when he joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the C
IA, Thomas admitted to his employers that two years earlier he had still been working for the Wertheimers when they asked him to undertake a four-month undercover operation in France. For the rest of his life, Thomas said little about it.

  Thomas’s few close friends testified to his secretive nature. One, an OSS colleague, Peter M. F. Sichel, told this author: “Thomas was not an easy man to make friends with; he had a mystique surrounding him and his past. Still, he was a man with a common touch—an imposing and erudite man but never a snob.”

  The exact details of Thomas’s covert activities for the Wertheimers remain secret—particularly how he managed to acquire the formula of the Chanel perfume—but he did get it to the Wertheimers in New York. Thomas left behind no details when he passed away in 1990 at age eighty-two; but Peter Sichel has filled in some blanks. Sichel, when based at the OSS’s World War II headquarters in Algiers and later in Europe, knew of Thomas’s OSS work in Portugal and Spain. Other information was revealed by investigative reporters Bruno Abescat and Yves Stavridès, writing in the French magazine L’Express in 2005, and by Véronique Maurus, writing in Le Monde. Abescat and Stavridès reported that Claude Lévy, the Wertheimers’ lawyer and the former mayor of Orléans, France, told them: “The feats accomplished by Pierre and Paul’s [Wertheimer] agent, Gregory Thomas, and his ability to get large quantities of jasmine out of France and to the United States, are out of a James Bond movie.”

  Sichel believes Thomas paid for his secret operations using “either Louis d’Or coins or English sovereigns” to pay agents and purchase supplies. Explaining OSS tradecraft during World War II, Sichel wrote: “The OSS used gold coins to finance missions in Europe and to buy foreign currency for OSS agent operations. I once smuggled Louis d’Or coins out of a European country, hidden in a shoe in my luggage. Though heavy, a big strong man like Gregory could easily have carried 500 Louis d’Or in his luggage.” Today a gold Louis, depending on the date of the coin, could be valued at between $800 and $3,000 each. Sichel added that at the time, “French francs had no great value, and Gregory had access to currency in Switzerland … [The OSS] had arrangements in France during the occupation to pay French agents using French francs advanced in France by others. The OSS reimbursed them by depositing money into their accounts in Switzerland.”