Coco Chanel ‘used Nazi’s help to regain perfume empire’

Fashion queen Coco Chanel enlisted Nazi help to regain her famed perfume from her Jewish partners, new film claims.

Fashion designer Coco Chanel. Photo: File

Coco Chanel, the queen of 20th-century fashion, enlisted Nazi help to regain ownership of her famed perfume from her Jewish partners, a new film has claimed.

The French designer and businesswoman, whose close relations with the German occupiers have been exposed in recent years, went to great lengths to use their Aryan laws to strip Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, her partners, of their rights, according to the new French documentary The No 5 War.

The Wertheimer brothers backed the full financial and production costs of the perfume in 1924. But Chanel, never satisfied with the ownership agreement, used her Vichy connections to try to force the Wertheimers out of the contract.

Fashion designer Coco Chanel wearing one of her early jersey outfits.

Her failed 1943 mission, on behalf of Nazi intelligence, to meet her friend Winston Churchill for peace talks, was part of her plan. She was trying to win German help to grab all the income from the revolutionary No 5, according to the film produced for the TV5 network. Churchill ignored Chanel’s invitation to meet in Madrid.

Stephane Benhamou, the director, scoured archives to fill out the account of Chanel’s wartime collaboration and love affairs. These were exposed in Sleeping with the Enemy, a 2011 biography by Hal Vaughan. The book documented Coco Chanel’s work for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, as Agent 7124, codename Westminster.

Benhamou, whose film will be screened at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival on Monday, claimed that the Chanel empire, still owned by the Wertheimer family, continues to play down the collaboration claims for commercial reasons. “It must not be forgotten that she tried to steal Jewish property,” he told Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper.

Chanel’s war against the Wertheimers, who ran a perfume and cosmetics business with American links, began soon after she engaged them to run the production and marketing of the new scent. Galeries Lafayette, the department store, told her that her own company did not have the capacity to produce the perfume. The scent was radically new as it used aldehydes to break with the floral notes that had long dominated the industry. Chanel received only 10 per cent of the profit, with 70 per cent going to the Wertheimers and 20 per cent to Galeries Lafayette.

Coco Chanel.

When her perfume became the world’s bestseller in 1927, people asked Chanel: “It’s named after you, why are you getting only 10 per cent?”

Before the war, Chanel mixed with high-powered Britons, including Churchill and the Duke of Westminster, one of the world’s richest men and a notorious antisemite, with whom she had an affair. Occupying the Ritz hotel under the Nazi occupation, she conducted a liaison with Hans Gunther von Dincklage, an aristocratic Abwehr spymaster, 13 years her junior.

While agreeing to help German intelligence, Chanel used her ties with Von Dincklage and other senior Nazis to try to strip the Wertheimers of their ownership of the lucrative perfume. They were then beginning to manufacture in exile in New York, Benhamou’s film shows. She invoked the Aryan laws which stripped Jews of their property, then discovered that the Wertheimers had transferred their ownership to Felix Amiot, a Christian friend.

In 1941 she claimed to officials that the sale was fictitious, and that the company was still in Jewish hands and requested full ownership. The Germans did not grant her wish because they did not want to disrupt their relationship with Amiot, who made military aircraft.

After the 1944 liberation, Chanel was investigated for collaboration crimes but released for lack of evidence and, it has long been rumoured, because Churchill intervened to save her. Chanel moved to Switzerland where she lived with her German lover and reached a settlement with the Wertheimers, receiving dollars 9 million for her share of No 5 sales during the war.

The Wertheimers refused to sue her because they did not want to damage the image of her brand, the filmmaker said. Chanel died in 1971 aged 87, as one of the world’s richest women.

Coco Chanel photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1964.

BEHIND THE STORY

France had turned a blind eye to Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s close involvement with the Nazi occupiers of Paris until the past few years.

Recently declassified archives have provided new evidence of collaboration but French writers have remained squeamish.

The most thorough expose was performed by an American, Hal Vaughan, in his 2011 book Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War. The book fuelled television documentaries that opened eyes over Chanel’s past.

However, in 2009, two movies on Chanel’s life simply avoided the delicate matter of the war. Audrey Tautou starred in Coco Before Chanel, a film directed by Anne Fontaine that recounted the early career of the free-spirited designer and the powerful men whom she courted in the pre-war years. Another biopic the same year, Jan Kounen’s Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, starring Anna Mouglalis, recounts her relationship in the First World War and the 1920s with the exiled Russian composer of the Rite of Spring.

THE TIMES