August 19, 2011, - 4:54 pm
Book: Coco Chanel Was a Jew-Hating Nazi Spy
As you know, most big-time fashion designers today are uber-leftists heavily involved in politics, whether it’s Donna Karan or the bizarre Mark Jacobs. I usually pay them no heed because I know they are following in the footsteps of their National Socialist (Nazi) Party-supporting brothers and sisters from eras past. We know that Hugo Boss designed Nazi uniforms. And, now, we’ve learned that Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was a Jew-hating Nazi spy. Not only that, but she used the Nazis’ anti-Semitic laws against Jewish ownership of property to seize the Chanel perfume from its Jewish owners. And her friend, Winston Churchill helped her escape any post-war justice. Remember that, the next time you see some rich snob wearing a Chanel suit turning her nose up at you. Turn your nose up at her. Her clothes have their roots in Nazism. (And remember that Winston Churchill had some major flaws, too.)
A new book by a Paris-based American historian suggests Chanel not only had a wartime affair with a German aristocrat and spy, but that she herself was also an agent of Germany’s Abwehr military intelligence organization and a rabid anti-Semite.
“Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War
” goes well beyond those previous allegations, citing as evidence documents culled from archives around the world.
Get Yours . . .
The book, published in the U.S. on Tuesday by Knopf, has ruffled feathers in France, where the luxury industry is a pillar of the economy and Chanel is widely regarded as the crowning jewel. . . .
Hal Vaughan, an 84-year-old World War II veteran and longtime journalist who previously wrote two other history books, insists that he is serious. “Sleeping with the Enemy” is the fruit of more than four years of intense labor born out of an accidental find in France’s national police archive, he said.
“I was looking for something else and I come across this document saying ‘Chanel is a Nazi agent, her number is blah, blah, blah and her pseudonym is Westminster,'” Vaughan told The Associated Press. . . . “Then I really started hunting through all of the archives, in the United States, in London, in Berlin and in Rome and I come across not one, but 20, 30, 40 absolutely solid archival materials on Chanel and her lover, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who was a professional Abwehr spy,” Vaughan said. . . .
During the conflict [DS: World War II], she holed up with von Dincklage — a dashing German officer 12 years her junior who was one in her long string of lovers — in Paris’ Ritz Hotel, which was then under Nazi control.
The book alleges that in 1940, Chanel was recruited into the Abwehr — her nom de guerre borrowed from another of her lovers, the Duke of Westminster. A year later, she traveled to Spain on a spy mission — on condition that the Nazis release her nephew from a military internment camp — and later went to Berlin on the orders of a top SS general, the book says.
It also suggests that Chanel’s alleged anti-Semitism pushed her to try to capitalize on laws allowing for the expropriation of Jewish property to wrest control of the Chanel perfume lines from the Wertheimer brothers, a Jewish family who’d helped make her Chanel No. 5 a worldwide best-seller. . . .
After the war, Chanel was arrested and released hours later, saved by “the intervention of her old friend Winston Churchill,” the press release for the book said. She fled to Switzerland.
Asked why the book, which is chock-a-block with allegations of Chanel’s shady dealings before, during and after the war, had turned up so much more dirt than the scores of previous biographies about the fashion icon, Vaughan had two explanations. Firstly, many of the documents he cited had only recently been declassified.
Secondly, he said, many people have a vested interest in protecting Chanel’s aura of unsullied chic.
“A lot of people in this world don’t want the iconic figure of Gabrielle Coco Chanel, one of France’s great cultural idols, destroyed,” said Vaughan. “This is definitely something that a lot of people would have preferred to put aside, to forget, to just go on selling Chanel scarves and jewelry.”
While disturbing and unacceptable, designer John Galliano’s anti-Semitic remarks, earlier this year, are nothing compared to what Coco Chanel did to help the Nazis (and hurt the Jews).
Tags: Abwehr, Abwehr Spy, Anti-Semite, anti-Semitic, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, Chanel No. 5, Coco Chanel, documents, Duke of Westminster, fashion, fashion designers, France, Gabrielle Chanel, Gabrielle Coco Chanel, Germany, Hal Vaughan, Hans Gunther Von Dincklage, Jew hater, Jew-hatred, Jews, Karl Lagerfeld, Knopf, Nazi Spy, Nazis, pseudonym, Rome, Sleeping with the Enemy, Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War, Wertheimer brothers, Westminster, Winston Churchill
FIRST! oder, auf deutsch, ERSTE!
unbelievable about this coco broad…
howardroark on August 19, 2011 at 5:17 pm