Coco Chanel: Wie der Modestar den Zweiten Weltkrieg beenden wollte

Coco Chanel: Wie der Modestar den Zweiten Weltkrieg beenden wollte

SPIEGEL+-Zugang wird gerade auf einem anderen Gerät genutzt

SPIEGEL+ kann nur auf einem Gerät zur selben Zeit genutzt werden.

Hier weiterlesen

Klicken Sie auf den Button, spielen wir den Hinweis auf dem anderen Gerät aus und Sie können SPIEGEL+ weiter nutzen.

Was Coco Chanel a Nazi spy? Legendary fashion designer was codenamed ‘Westminster’, claims TikToker

Legendary French designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was allegedly a Nazi spy with a “code name and everything", a TikToker recently claimed in her video. The video has been viewed more than 78,000 times so far.

TikTok user @ts_semiautobiographical, who has more than 27,000 followers, went viral after she responded to a challenge by user @just..phil. The challenge was for people to share the names of historical figures with controversial legacies. “Who was an awful person alive but history seems to glorify them?” @just..phil said in the video, posted on January 23. “You know, somebody like Christopher Columbus?”

READ MORE

Pearl Milling Company: Aunt Jemima trolled over new name, Internet says woke White women were ‘pissed’ about it

Is Rachael Kirkconnell racist? TikTok user accuses ‘The Bachelor’ star of ‘bullying’ her for liking Black men

User @ts_semiautobiographical, who goes by ‘Ms. Jones’, responded on Tuesday, February 9, with a video about Coco Chanel. “She was an actual Nazi, like a hired hand of the Nazi Party, yet she’s still evangelized and admired,” the TikToker said adding that Coco Chanel’s alleged codename was “Westminster.” She also weighed in on the extent of Coco Chanel’s involvement with the Nazi Party saying that the designer was either “simply useful” in providing intel on the Jewish elite, or she was a “wicked combination of opportunistic and anti-Semitic.”

Gabrielle Chanel, known as Coco (1883 - 1971), top French couturier, at Fauborg, Paris (Getty Images)

The TikToker added that if it was the former, Coco Chanel was likely using her access to the Jewish elite to “help grow her empire.” If it was the latter, Coco Chanel “actually manipulated the Nazi Party in order to build her empire and empower her anti-semitism. But that reputation doesn’t precede her,” Ms Jones concluded.

Ms Jones wasn’t the first person to accuse Coco Chanel of being connected to the Nazis. According to a 2017 Snopes fact check, Coco Chanel was in a relationship with one Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who was a “special attaché” of the German government sent to Paris in 1933. At one point, they even lived together. The myth-busting outlet also uploaded photos of declassified government documents from the French Defense Ministry’s archives in which a reference to “Madame COCO CHANEL" could be found. According to Snopes’ translation of the French document, Coco Chanel was von Dincklage’s “mistress and agent” from 1942 to 1943.

French couturier Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel at her home (Getty Images)

There is also a profile of the designer on Biography.com, according to which Coco Chanel wanted to remain in the good books of a German military officer due to her personal benefits. She reportedly wanted to ensure the release of her nephew who was imprisoned by the Germans since 1940. The profile says that she got the nickname “Westminster,” due to her past relationship with the Duke of Westminster.

She also reportedly harbored resentment toward a Jewish family, referred to only as the Wertheimers, who allegedly promoted the launch of her perfume line but pocketed most of her profits. She might have used this to her advantage when Jews were forced to give up their businesses. In a Forbes profile in August about her, it was said that while her brand historically distanced itself from its Nazi ties, a need for more transparency remains, especially amid the global scale of the Black Lives Matter movement last year, which prompted many businesses and brands to revisit their problematic pasts and practices.

If you have a news scoop or an interesting story for us, please reach out at (323) 421-7514

Strong whiff of wartime scandal clings to Coco Chanel

A magazine with creations by French designer Gabrielle Chanel Photo: AFP

Perfume Chanel No. 5 Photo: AFP

Part of a coat designed by Gabrielle Chanel Photo: AFP

When Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel died in her suite at the Ritz in Paris 50 years ago this week, the world mourned the greatest fashion designer of the century.What no one mentioned was that Chanel had spent World War II in the luxury hotel with her German officer lover working as a spy for both German military intelligence and the SS.After the war, Chanel - who had risen from grim childhood in an orphanage to befriend, and sometimes sleep with, some of the richest and most powerful men in the world - did her utmost to cover her tracks.So successful was her rewriting of history that AFP, like the rest of the world’s media, was taken in.“At the beginning of the war, Chanel closed her couture house and withdrew to the shores of Lake Geneva, where she lived for 15 years on the royalties of her perfumes,” it reported after her death, quoting her official biography.The reality was quite different.Although Chanel did close her famous studio on the rue Cambon once the French capital was occupied by the Nazis, her perfume boutique stayed open so German soldiers could buy bottles of Chanel No. 5 for their sweethearts.Soon Chanel, then 57 but just as glamorous as ever, was on the arm of an aristocratic attache at the German embassy, Baron Hans Guenther von Dincklage.Dincklage was 13 years her junior and a spy.The two took up together in the Ritz where Chanel had lived since 1937, and which had been requisitioned by the Germans to serve as their headquarters and to accommodate the luxury-loving head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering.Chanel began working for Dincklage’s colleagues in Germany’s Abwehr military intelligence in return for her young nephew Andre Palasse being released from a German stalag after being captured defending France’s Maginot Line.She became Abwehr Agent F-7124 in 1941, codenamed “Westminster” after her longtime lover the Duke of Westminster, Britain’s richest landowner.More darkly, Chanel began pulling strings to claw back the rights to her perfumes from the Jewish Wertheimer brothers, who had fled to the US when the Germans invaded.She hoped to use the Nazi’s “aryanization” laws to take back control of the perfumes that she signed away to the Wertheimers in 1924.But the brothers had foreseen the danger and signed their business over to a non-Jewish businessman before fleeing France.Chanel’s work as a spy involved wining and dining British diplomats in neutral Spain.But as the tide of the war turned against Germany, and her efforts to get her brand back were frustrated, Chanel set her ambitions still higher - on ending the war itself.In April 1943 she made one of two visits to Berlin to see General Walter Friedrich Schellenberg, the head of SS intelligence.He wanted to send word to Chanel’s old friend, British prime minister Winston Churchill, that senior SS officers wanted to negotiate a peace.But “Operation Modelhut” (meaning fashion model’s hat, after Chanel’s famous boater) ended in farce with Chanel and Dincklage forced to hot-foot it out of Madrid when English socialite Vera Lombardi, who was carrying Chanel’s letter to Churchill to the British embassy, denounced them as German spies.Chanel had arranged for Lombardi - a mutual friend of hers and Churchill’s - to be released from an Italian prison where she was being held as a British spy.Lombardi had been close to Chanel since the 1920s, introducing her to her friend, the future king Edward VIII, an admirer of Hitler, and the cream of London society.When Paris was liberated in 1944, Chanel was arrested by the French Resistance but released a few hours later when Churchill intervened. She was soon safely out of the country in Switzerland when she set up home in a luxury hotel in Saint Moritz.She didn’t return until 1953, when she made a comeback at 70 and reopened her fashion house, having done a deal with the forgiving Wertheimers.It wasn’t until the French writer and Resistance heroine Edmonde Charles-Roux published her book, Chanel: Her life, her world, and the woman behind the legend she herself created, three years after the designer’s death, that the truth began to trickle out.In 1995 the French weekly L’Express uncovered more compromising testimony, which its German counterpart Der Spiegel added to in 2008.But the veil was truly lifted in 2011 with the publication of Sleeping With the Enemy by the US writer Hal Vaughan.His biography, supported by documents from French, German, British, Italian and Polish archives, claims that Chanel was a “fanatical anti-Communist” and “a vicious anti-Semite.““Hal Vaughan’s book shows incontestable evidence that Mademoiselle Chanel seriously compromised herself with the Germans,” Charles-Roux told AFP before her death in 2016.But she insisted that Chanel never said anything anti-Semitic to her. “I wouldn’t have put up with it,” she added.After Vaughan’s book was published the Wertheimer family, who still own Chanel, denied the great designer was anti-Semitic.And they argued that there was still “an element of mystery” about exactly what Coco did during the war.