7. Nazi Attitudes Towards Teen Fashion and Lifestyle Rebels Hardened During WWII
The Nazis initially dismissed the Edelweiss Pirates as minor irritants and teenaged delinquents going through a phase. Attitudes hardened when WWII began, however. The authorities blamed the Edelweiss Pirates for collecting anti-Nazi propaganda leaflets dropped by British bombers, and stuffing them into mailboxes. That was viewed as subversion during wartime, and treason. In 1943, for example, authorities in Dusseldorf complained to the Gestapo that the local Edelweiss “gang” was a bad influence on other youth, as well as on young soldiers, who hung out with them while on leave. The report noted:
“These adolescents, aged between 12 and 17, hang around late in the evening with musical instruments and young females. Since this riff-raff is in large part outside the Hitler Youth and adopts a hostile attitude towards the organization, they represent a danger to other young people.” Nonetheless, the local authorities were relatively lenient with the Edelweiss, when compared to how they dealt with adult subversives. Take the penalties for “delinquents” who kept their hair long and their appearance bohemian as a fashion statement to set themselves apart from the militarized regimentation all around them. They were usually given a stern talking-to, then had their heads shaved.
6. Nonconformist Teen Lifestyle and Fashion Could Get Kids Sent to Concentration Camps or Executed in Nazi Germany
Stern talks and head shaves for nonconformist teenagers was too lenient for SS head honcho, Heinrich Himmler. He wanted an example made of youths who failed to show complete loyalty. The teen rebelliousness, refusal to toe the line, and counterculture lifestyle and fashion of the Edelweiss Pirates galled Himmler. He deemed any half measures when dealing with such “delinquents” to be unacceptable. In 1942, he wrote to his deputy Reinhard Heydrich that he wanted such kids to do two or three-year stints in concentration camps:
“There the youth should first be given thrashings and then put through the severest drill and set to work. It must be made clear that they will never be allowed to go back to their studies. We must investigate how much encouragement they have had from their parents. If they have encouraged them, then they should also be put into a concentration camp and (have) their property confiscated“. By 1944, with Third Reich clearly circling the drain, Himmler ordered an even more brutal crackdown. In November of that year, thirteen youths were hanged in public in Cologne, many of them active or former Edelweiss Pirates.
Edelweiss Pirates in later years at a festival in Cologne, 2005. Wikimedia
5. Some of These Literal Fashion Rebels Continued on as Dissidents After WWII, While Others Became Reactionaries
Official repression failed to break the anti-Hitler youth coalition, which continued on as a defiant subculture. Its mores, lifestyle, and fashion rejected the norms of Nazi society, until the “Thousand Year Reich” went down to defeat after a mere twelve years. Postwar, some factions of the Edelweiss Pirates attempted to work with the Allied occupation authorities. Their advances were welcomed, particularly by the communists in the Soviet-occupied zone. However, most of the rank and file membership, true to their ethos, turned their backs on what was seen as attempts to politicize their movement.
Having risked their lives to evade the regimentation of the Nazis, they were not eager to embrace regimentation under the communists. As a result, those who remained in what became communist East Germany ended up as dissidents and social outcasts. Many of them did long stints in prison as a result. In an unfortunate irony, many Edelweiss Pirates in West Germany ended up as reactionaries, even less reconciled to defeat than the Nazis. They became notorious for their attacks on Germans – particularly women – known to have been friendly or intimate with occupation soldiers.
Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel (1883 – 1971) dominated Paris’ haute couture scene for six decades as its most prominent fashion designer. She came up with elegant casual designs that killed off uncomfortable nineteenth styles such as petticoats and corsets. Her innovations include the “little black dress“, costume jewelry, the Chanel suit, and quilted purses. The most famous item associated with her name, however, is the first perfume she launched, Chanel No. 5. When Time magazine published its list of 100 most influential people of the twentieth century, Coco Chanel was the only fashion designer to make the cut.
Gabrielle claimed that Coco was a nickname given her by her father. However, that is probably one of many untruths she made up about her family background. She reportedly got the name in her years as a cabaret singer, when she often performed a then-popular song called Who Has Seen Coco? Other accounts have it that it was a play on cocotte, the French term for a mistress. Yet another version has it that she was “called Coco because she threw the most fabulous cocaine parties in Paris“.
Coco Chanel and Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster. Classic Chicago Magazine
3. The Ugly Side of a Fashion Icon
However she acquired her iconic name, Gabriel Bonheur Chanel revolutionized the fashion business as Coco Chanel, and inspired millions. Less known about her is she was a rabid anti-Semite, an admirer of Hitler, and a Nazi collaborator who worked as a spy for the Germans in WWII. Coco Chanel had long been a reactionary and anti-Semite and got on well with others who disliked Jews. In 1923, she began a ten-year affair with Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, one of the world’s richest men at the time, and a rabid anti-Semite.
In the 1930s, Coco Chanel began a relationship with an illustrator named Paul Iribe, and financed his monthly journal, a reactionary anti-republican and anti-Semitic rag. She often stated that she believed that the Jews were a threat to Europe. As such, it is no surprise that Chanel got on well with the Nazis and collaborated with them when they conquered France in 1940. In the years of occupation, Chanel lived in Paris’ Hotel Ritz, where many high-ranking German military and Nazi officials dwelt.
Pierre Wertheimer. Bibliotheque Natioanle de France
2. How Coco Chanel Tried to Profit From the Holocaust
As her native France groaned under Nazi occupation, Coco Chanel became the mistress of Baron Gunther von Dincklage, a diplomat and German military intelligence operative. Before the war, the majority owner of Parfums Chanel, the company that marketed Chanel No. 5, was a Jewish businessman named Pierre Wertheimer. The Nazis routinely confiscated Jewish property and gave it to Aryans. Chanel petitioned the Nazis that since she was Aryan, they ought to seize Wertheimer’s share of Parfums Chanel and hand it over to her.
Unbeknownst to her, Wertheimer had guessed that the Nazis would confiscate Jewish properties. So before they got around to it, he transferred legal ownership of his business entities to a Christian French industrialist. That industrialist had more integrity than Chanel, and returned the businesses to Wertheimer when France was liberated. After the war, French intelligence described the fashion icon as a Hitler fan and “vicious anti-Semite“. Coco Chanel was more than that: as seen below, she was a collaborator and traitor who had directly worked for the Nazi occupiers.
1. A Celebrated Fashion Icon Who Had Collaborated With and Spied for the Nazis
When Paris was liberated in 1944, Chanel fled to Switzerland to avoid criminal charges for collaboration with the Germans as a spy. She lived there with her German lover, Baron Dincklage, before she returned to France in the 1950s to get back in the fashion business. Ironically, her comeback was financed by Pierre Wertheimer, the Jewish entrepreneur she had tried to screw out of the Parfums Chanel business during the war. Whatever he thought about Chanel as a person, Wertheimer was the majority owner of a lucrative enterprise and brand that bore her name. As such, he had a financial stake in the preservation of the famous fashion icon’s image.
Coco Chanel. In Style
Chanel’s comeback was a success. The public by and large remained ignorant of what kind of person she really was until long after her death in 1971, at age 87. Decades later, declassified documents confirmed that she had worked for both the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and the dreaded Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the intelligence arm of the SS and Nazi Party. Her SD boss was SS General Walter Schellenberg, who was sentenced by the Nuremberg Tribunal to six years for war crimes. After his release in 1951, Chanel supported Schellenberg and his family financially and paid for his funeral when he died a year later.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
