Chanel’s Nazi plot to throw Jews off scent
Coco Chanel, the queen of 20thcentury fashion, enlisted Nazi help to regain ownership of her famed perfume from her Jewish business partners, a new film claims.
The French designer and businesswoman, whose close relations with the German occupiers of France during World War II have been exposed in recent years, went to great lengths to use their Aryan laws to strip Pierre and Paul Wertheimer of their rights to Chanel No 5, 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 French connections to try to force the Wertheimers out of the contract.
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 documentary’s 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 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 this week, claims 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 Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
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.
Department store Galeries Lafayette 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 profits, with 70 per cent going to the Wertheimers and 20 per cent to Galeries Lafayette.
When her perfume became the world’s best seller 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, which they were 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 of France, Chanel was investigated for collaboration crimes but released for lack of evidence and, it has long been rumoured, because Churchill intervened to save her.
She moved to Switzerland, where she lived with her German lover and reached a settlement with the Wertheimers, receiving US$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, Benhamou said. Chanel died in 1971, aged 87, as one of the world’s richest women.
In 2009, two movies about Chanel’s life simply avoided the delicate matter of the war. Audrey Tautou starred in Coco Before Chanel, which recounted the early career of the free-spirited designer and the powerful men she courted in the pre-war years. Another biopic, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, recounted her relationship during World War I and the 1920s with the exiled Russian composer of The Rite of Spring.