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.
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
BBC – Hugo Boss Apology For Nazi Past as Book is Published
BBC – The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Status Pineapple
British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep. 1987) – Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair
Burr, Chandler – The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession (2004)
Cherry, Paul – The Biker Trials: Bringing Down the Hells Angels (2005)
Encyclopedia Britannica – Hitler Youth
Encyclopedia.Com – Fashion During the French Revolution
History – How the Hitler Youth Turned a Generation of Kids Into Nazis
History Collection – The Most Famous Male Style Icons
History Learning Site – The Edelweiss Pirates
Holocaust Research Project – The Hitler Youth
History Collection – Business Pioneers that Had Quite the Disturbing Background
Kaloni – 10 Facts About Men’s Long Hair in History
Marsden, William, and Sher, Julian – Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers’ Empire of Crime (2010)
National Motorcycle Museum – 1942 Harley Davidson WLA, The Liberator
New York Times, August 15th, 1997 – Hugo Boss Acknowledges Link to Nazi Regime
Paris Review, April 25th, 2018 – The Strange History of the “King-Pine”
Porter, Monica – Children Against Hitler: The Young Resistance Heroes of the Second World War (2020)
Racked – How Pink Became a Color for Girls
Schama, Simon – Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1990)
Time Magazine, August 3rd, 2009 – A Brief History of the Hells Angels
Vaughan, Hal – Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (2012)
