by Hal Vaughan
In a 1989 interview in Forbes magazine, Thomas had revealed he “bribed French gangsters” to help get Jacques to America. From other sources we know that Jacques left Lisbon aboard the American Export Lines on the 7,000-ton Excalibur, a transatlantic steamer bound for New York, on November 21, 1940. The Excalibur’s manifest curiously lists Jacques, a French citizen, as a “Hebrew.”
Eventually, Thomas completed his mission for the Wertheimer brothers and returned to New York. A few months after Pearl Harbor, with the United States now at war, he was recruited as a senior officer into William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan’s OSS spy organization and sent to Spain and Portugal as chief of station. (Thomas was in Madrid when Chanel arrived there in 1944 on a mission for SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, but there is no reference to Chanel in Thomas’s OSS files.) After the war the Wertheimer brothers made Gregory Thomas the president of Chanel, Inc., the United States parent company for the Chanel firm. Thomas remained at Chanel, Inc., for the next twenty-five years.
TEN
A MISSION FOR HIMMLER
She wanted to live a hidden life.
—EDMONDE CHARLES-ROUX, L’IRRÉGULIÈRE
ON MONDAY MORNING, November 9, 1942, most of France woke to headlines. One read: “Dirty Anglo-American Attack Against Our North Africa.”
Chanel was stunned. Paris was reeling.
It had been a bold and secret operation. The front-page editorial in Le Matin offered a familiar scapegoat: “The Jews with their low blows will fail as will the English and Americans. When France is betrayed it strikes back—every Frenchman, all Europe, stands with France.”
Another newspaper assured the reader, “Adolf Hitler” declared “We will fight to the end.” Within a few hours a Paris radio announced how British and American troops, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, had stormed the beaches of Algeria and Morocco at dawn that Monday. The world learned later that the risky invasion dubbed Operation Torch was “President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s baby.”
With the beaches of Algeria and Morocco secure, Winston Churchill broadcast to Europe over the BBC: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.” Though the Nazis forbade the French from listening to the BBC, clandestine radios everywhere were secretly tuned to the regular evening broadcasts: “This is London calling.” Night after night, dry-toned BBC commentators told of the Allies’ successes in North Africa, and how Pétain’s right-hand man Admiral François Darlan had gone over to the Americans. The BBC didn’t miss a chance to warn how collabos would be punished when France was liberated.
BBC threats and Churchill’s brave words made many collaborators’ stomachs churn. Chanel had already been labeled a “horizontal collaborator” along with French actress Arletty. In 1942, Life magazine published a blacklist of French citizens accused of collaborating with the Germans. Among the entries was Chanel’s lawyer, René de Chambrun. The Free French knew that hanging on the walls of Chambrun’s home was a group of valuable paintings stolen by the Nazis from the Schloss family and Rosenberg collections. The Life magazine article warned, “Some [collaborators] will be assassinated … others will be tried when France is free.” The publication, read by millions of Americans, claimed that the Vichy leaders Marshal Philippe Pétain and René de Chambrun’s father-in law, Pierre Laval, would be tried as collaborators and punished.
The Life report must have come as a shock to Chambrun, a direct descendant of Lafayette, an honorary citizen of the state of Delaware, and a man respected by the elite of Washington. Now he was condemned by General Charles de Gaulle’s secret underground army in France. Chanel and other collaborators had to wonder what lay ahead.
On the Monday of the invasion, Chanel’s friend Josée Laval Chambrun noted in her diary: “The Americans have attacked Algeria and Morocco. André Dubonnet woke us [Josée and husband René] with the news and wanted to know if it was true.” Josée went to lunch at Fouquet’s ultrachic restaurant on the Champs-Élysées that day and noted later: “Darlan and Juin [the commanders of French forces in North Africa] will also soon switch sides to support the Allies. I have the same sensation as in May and June 1940 when life was suspended [when the Germans invaded]. It’s the end of an epoch.”
René and Josée had reason to worry. From early in the occupation, Chanel’s lawyer edited a confidential information sheet for Pierre Laval, explaining Vichy’s anti-Semitic actions. He also represented U.S. companies with subsidiaries operating in Nazi Germany. Chambrun didn’t trouble to hide his enthusiasm for collaborating with Hitler’s Reich. Until the North African Allied landings, he cohosted business luncheons at the Ritz, where Nazi and French collabos met to plan business ventures—political, economic, and financial cooperation as part of Hitler’s European New Order.
At Christmas, the headlines blared again: “Gaullist Patriots Assassinate Admiral François Darlan in Algiers.” German troops now occupied all of France. When they tried to seize the French fleet at Toulon, French sailors scuttled their ships in the harbor. France was now totally under the Nazi boot. Nazi thugs ruled at Vichy. Pétain was powerless.
By January 1943, Chambrun was so demoralized he confessed to friend Dr. Ernst Achenbach, Otto Abetz’s right-hand man at the German Embassy in Paris: “It’s tough, collaboration is.”
THE WINTER OF 1943 was unbearable. As the temperature dropped, damp winds gripped Paris. The mood dipped with the thermometer. The freezing cold was made unbearable by near starvation as rations were cut for those unable to pay black-market prices. Everything was scarce: shoes, cloth, milk, cheese, butter, meat, and wine. Old folks were literally starving in their beds trying to keep warm and to make it through the day.
The image of the enemy, of proud and handsome Aryans swaggering along the Champs-Élysées flirting with pretty demoiselles, had been transformed into one of overbearing, arrogant, aging men too old to be conscripted to fight on the Russian front. The mood had turned from reluctant acceptance by ordinary Parisians to the grim fatalism of the occupied.
By year’s end open hostility and resistance to the Germans was manifest. In the offices of a French law firm on the Champs-Élysées, employees now turned their backs to the tall windows when German troops paraded on the street below in a show of their disgust. Paris, once the center of culture and good taste, had become a dangerous outpost where angry men set out after the evening curfew to kill Germans and to punish known collaborators and black-market operators. A senior Nazi official reported to Berlin that as of early 1943, there was no denying a “general rejection of all things German” and a widely shared hope among the French for “an imminent collapse of Germany and an Allied victory in this year.” German enlisted men and their officers “spent one Sunday a month practicing grenade throwing and rifle shooting at the Paris firing range.” They knew they might have to defend their lives against an army of shadows sometime soon.
Dincklage and Chanel had to wonder if they could escape the wrath of Charles de Gaulle’s resistance. His Free French fighters or the Communists in France were growing more violent toward collaborators. Chanel’s relations with the Nazis, her fierce anti-Semitism, and her declaration, “France has got what she deserves,” a remark she made at a lunch party on the Côte d’Azur in 1943, had been recorded in London by General de Gaulle’s Free French intelligence service and by partisan resistance forces in France. Chanel, Jean Cocteau, and Serge Lifar were also marked for punishment.
Dincklage knew he was a marked man. British and French underground agents working in France and General de Gaulle’s Free French in London had a record of his work for the Nazis on the Côte d’Azur and in Paris and Switzerland. His cooperation with the Gestapo, his naming of Jews in France, and his link to Adolf Hitler were on record. Inevitably, Dincklage and Chanel were slated for vengeance. They knew the curtain was slowly descending on their tidy world. Already, Dincklage’s friend and Abwehr colleague, Nazi major Theodor Momm, was hinting that Dincklage should leave P
aris. Momm wanted Dincklage to go to Turkey and work with Momm’s brother at the Abwehr headquarters in Istanbul.
When Coco learned that Momm might arrange to separate her from Dincklage, she must have been devastated. Until Dincklage came along, Chanel, age sixty (she had lied about her age on her passport application, giving her birth date as 1893 instead of 1883), had not had a permanent male companion since the death of Paul Iribe in the summer of 1935. And though charmless, Momm may have hoped to replace Dincklage, but he was no alternative. Chanel would have moved heaven and earth to keep Spatz close to her.
Dincklage and Chanel had a plan. It called for Chanel to meet with her old friend, the British ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare, in Madrid. It was a repeat of her earlier mission to Madrid with Vaufreland, except this time it was for a cause she believed in. Chanel knew through Sir Samuel that she could communicate with the Duke of Westminster in London via the British Embassy’s communication network in Madrid. She hoped with Bendor’s help to inform Prime Minister Churchill that some senior German officials wanted Hitler removed from power and hostilities with Britain ended. Churchill must realize it would be a disaster if Germany fell into Soviet hands.
Abwehr major Theodor Momm, Dincklage’s fellow German World War I officer. Chanel and Dincklage sent Momm to Berlin in 1943 to offer Chanel’s services to SS general Walter Schellenberg. (illustration credit 10.1)
Dincklage would accompany Chanel to Madrid—there he would act as a link between Chanel and the German Embassy in Madrid and be available to communicate with Berlin from the embassy. He would also explore the possibility of contacting other Allied sources in Madrid.
IN THE EARLY WINTER OF 1943, Dincklage traveled to Berlin in the hope of convincing his Abwehr bosses that Chanel was a valuable and willing intermediary ready once again to cooperate with the Abwehr and travel to Madrid; she would use her high-level contacts to reach out to Westminster and Churchill through British ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare.
While in Berlin Dincklage must have seen evidence of Berlin’s destruction by Allied bombers. His mother, Lorry, now seventy-seven and living in the countryside near the seaport of Kiel with her aunt, Baroness Weher-Rosenkranz, must have told her son how life was growing desperate in his homeland. The Kiel area was being devastated by Allied bombs. Dincklage returned to Paris convinced that Nazi Germany was doomed and confident his Abwehr bosses would look favorably on his offer to have Chanel serve their interests “among important persons in American and British circles.”
Henry Gidel, an award-winning French historian and a biographer of Chanel’s, wrote that Mademoiselle Chanel thought she could barter her friendship with Winston Churchill to persuade the Nazis that she and Dincklage had the contacts to broker a separate peace deal with Britain. Gidel believed Bendor, Duke of Westminster, well known for being pro-German along with many other senior British politicians and royals, feared that the Soviet Union would grab all of Europe. Bendor encouraged Chanel to act as emissary between Berlin and London. Gidel wrote: “It was established that Westminster was a determined partisan of a separate peace with Germany. It is certain that from the beginning Chanel’s initiative (to carry a message from the Nazis to the British) was secretly supported by Bendor who had already tried to get his friend Churchill to accept his point of view”—a negotiated bilateral end to hostilities. Further: “Bendor believed that if Chanel had even a small chance of bringing the Germans or their intermediaries together with Churchill it was worth the effort.”
Bendor was not the only member of the British establishment seeking to end hostilities between Britain and Germany. James Lonsdale-Bryans, British diplomat and Nazi sympathizer acting for the Foreign Office, traveled to Rome in 1940 to meet Ulrich von Hassell, the German ambassador to Italy. However, for reasons never explained his mission failed. According to a British Secret Service report (MI5), Lonsdale-Bryans “had the ear of several members of the British Parliament, including Lord Halifax.”
IN NAZI GERMANY, Heinrich Himmler, Reich Minister of the Interior, chief of the SS and the Gestapo—the man Hitler picked to be “the supreme overseer of the Final Solution”—was secretly convinced Germany could not win the war. As early as fall 1942 Himmler tacitly allowed General Walter Schellenberg, then Himmler’s head of SS intelligence, to secretly test how Swiss and Swedish representatives might be used to seek an end to hostilities with Britain. Himmler wanted Schellenberg to find “a way out of the raging sea of blood of SS mass murders.” The Roman Catholic son of a piano builder, Schellenberg, thirty-three, was a former lawyer. He was described by the American journalist William L. Shirer as a “university-educated intellectual gangster.” British historian Anthony Cave Brown called Schellenberg “the sixth most powerful man in the Reich, but not a Nazi tin god—a man able, quick and dangerous.”
Schellenberg’s postwar interrogators were a distinguished British group of “spy catchers”—Hugh Trevor-Roper, Helenus Patrick Milmo, Klop Ustinov, Sir Stuart Hampshire, and Roy Cameron—all having different opinions about the SS intelligence chief. A succinct résumé of Schellenberg’s character, compiled by one of his captors and signed with a cryptic “MFIU 3 HDH,” makes chilling reading:
By all counts, [Schellenberg is] a low character without standards of loyalty and common decency—a man who under no circumstance could be trusted. A consummate actor. He can turn on the charm and when he does, the impression of being face to face with a nice harmless and quite ingenious young man is all but irresistible … [H]e looks people deep in the eyes as if he were trying to convey: “Look, what I am telling you here is from the depth of my heart.” The real Schellenberg is an ice-cold, ever-calculating realist who leaves nothing to chance. In his weak moments, he knows how to regulate the impression he sees fit to give. Schellenberg knows what he wants, knows how to get there if need be over corpses. For Schellenberg, the words “friendship” and “loyalty” bear no meaning, nor does he expect them for others … Besides his manifold talents and his unabashed self-esteem, Schellenberg suffers from a bad case of inferiority complex.
With Himmler’s approval and despite Hitler’s unshakable dictum of total war—meaning either the destruction of the Reich or ultimate victory—Walter Schellenberg now harnessed his contacts in neutral countries to find a way out should Germany fail. Initially, he managed to obtain a promise from Swiss army commander in chief General Henri Guisan that Switzerland would remain neutral but would repel any invader. With Guisan’s pledge in hand, Schellenberg convinced Himmler and the Nazi hierarchy not to invade their neighbor. With this move Schellenberg enhanced his relations with Bern and now pushed his contacts to open a dialogue with American OSS agents working for chief Allen Dulles in the Swiss capital. As proof of his good faith, Schellenberg released a number of Jews held in concentration camps to the Swiss.
THE YEAR 1943 began badly for Hitler. German forces were on the run after the siege of Stalingrad was broken by the Red Army. A declaration by Churchill, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle (with Stalin’s agreement) proclaimed that the Allies would demand the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. Soon, German and Italian forces would capitulate to the Allies in North Africa, and Eisenhower’s GIs would take the lead invading Sicily. After Allied forces invaded the Italian mainland, Benito Mussolini was dismissed by King Victor Emmanuel III. In July 1943 Italy would surrender to the Allies. Later that year the king and his prime minister, General Pietro Badoglio, would declare war on Germany. Even the censored news in Paris couldn’t hide the fragility of the German situation. The BBC evening broadcasts spared no details of how German cities were being massively bombed day after day. Nazi Germany was doomed.
In the early spring of 1943 Count Joseph von Ledebur-Wicheln, a senior Abwehr agent in Paris, received a telephone call from Berlin. Captain Erich Pheiffer, head of the Abwehr foreign espionage section in Berlin, was calling via a secure line. He wanted Count Ledebur to contact Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage.
Ledebur defected to the British Secret Service,
MI6, in Madrid in 1944. He told his MI6 interrogators what happened after he talked with his boss, Captain Pheiffer: “Pheiffer told me Dincklage was offering the high-level contacts of Coco Chanel in London to assist the German intelligence service … Pheiffer asked me to investigate Dincklage’s proposals.”
Ledebur now summoned Dincklage to his office on the rue de Tilsitt, off the Champs-Élysées. During this first meeting, Dincklage explained to Ledebur how “Chanel was ready to cooperate with the Abwehr—to go to Madrid and Lisbon and contact important persons in American and British circles and later to England.” But, Dincklage insisted, “The Abwehr had first to bring to France a young Italian woman Coco Chanel was attached to because of her lesbian vices. The woman was to accompany Chanel on her trips to the Iberian Peninsula and to London. Ledebur would have to arrange for the Abwehr to furnish passports and visas for Chanel, the girl and Dincklage.”