BERLIN – A new bombshell book about the French fashion giant Coco Chanel asserts
the Nazis recruited her as a spy, and she didn’t harbor hardcore anti-Semitic
views only to placate the Germans.
According to the book
Sleeping With
The Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, by Hal Vaughan, Chanel was the lover of
Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who ran a network for Nazi Germany’s Abwehr
military intelligence unit.
Vaughan, an American who resides in Paris,
wrote von Dincklage “ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and
reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, right hand of
Hitler.”
According to Vaughan’s New York publisher, Knopf,
Sleeping with the
Enemy "pieces together how Chanel became a German operative, how and why
she was enlisted in a number of spy missions, and how she escaped
arrest in France after the war.”
The
Daily Mail reported Vaughan said Chanel was “fiercely
anti-Semitic long before it became a question of pleasing the Germans. She
became rich by catering to the very rich, and shared their dislike of Jews” and
others.
Time magazine placed Chanel on its list of the top 100 people of
the century. Her life has been depicted in books, film and theater. She gained
international fame due to her line of perfumes, including the household name
Chanel No. 5 perfume, and her line of highend fashion dresses.
Chanel, an
orphan, was born in 1883 in the city of Saumur, France and relocated to
Switzerland after WWII in 1945. The post-Vichy government in France under
Charles de Gaulle – and successive French governments – did not prosecute Chanel
for complicity with the Nazis.