The Designer Who Spied For The Nazis

Her name is on one of the most famous and glamorous brands in the world. Coco Chanel — the woman who invented the little black dress, whose perfume, Chanel No. 5, is legendary, who is remembered as a towering icon of 20th-century style and sophistication.

But behind that shimmering image lies a genuinely dark secret that the fashion world spent decades trying to forget.

During the Second World War, Coco Chanel lived in luxury at the Ritz Hotel in occupied Paris, had a wartime relationship with a German intelligence officer, and was documented in declassified files as an agent of German military intelligence, complete with her own agent number and codename.

And she tried to use the Nazis’ antisemitic laws to seize a company from its Jewish owners.

The story begins when Nazi Germany occupied Paris in 1940. Chanel was living at the Ritz Hotel, the most glamorous address in Paris — which the Germans promptly took over as a headquarters. And there, Chanel began or continued a wartime affair with a German officer named Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a man who was not merely a soldier but was connected to German military intelligence, the Abwehr.

Through this relationship, and while living in comfort in the German-occupied hotel as France suffered under occupation, Chanel was pulled into the world of Nazi intelligence.

The Horror

And she did not merely sleep with the enemy — documents indicate that she worked for them.

This is not simply tabloid speculation. Declassified French intelligence documents and German records, examined by historians and brought to wider public attention through a French television documentary and Hal Vaughan’s investigative book Sleeping with the Enemy, identify Chanel as connected to the Abwehr.

She was given an agent number: F-7124.

And she was given a codename: “Westminster” — a reference to her long-ago love affair with the Duke of Westminster, one of the richest men in Britain.

The queen of French fashion was, on paper, a German intelligence agent.

She was reportedly drawn into this world partly by a promise that mattered deeply to her: the possible release of her beloved nephew André, who was held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. He was indeed released. The exact degree to which Chanel’s intelligence work was a direct exchange for his freedom remains debated, but the connection appears in the accounts of her recruitment.

And in 1941, Chanel undertook a mission to Madrid, in neutral Spain, alongside another Abwehr-linked agent. The purpose was intelligence work and political contact-gathering. The precise details of what information she obtained or passed on remain uncertain, but the trip was not a holiday.

The fashion designer had become an intelligence asset for the Third Reich.

But the single most damning thing Coco Chanel did during the war had nothing to do with spycraft, and everything to do with greed.

Years earlier, in 1924, Chanel had signed over most of the ownership of her hugely profitable perfume business — including the golden goose, Chanel No. 5 — to a pair of business partners, the Wertheimer brothers.

The Wertheimers were Jewish.

And when the Nazis occupied France and began enforcing their vile antisemitic laws, including the so-called “Aryanisation” laws that stripped Jews of the right to own businesses, Coco Chanel saw an opportunity.

With the Wertheimer brothers forced to flee France for America to escape Nazi persecution, Chanel petitioned the Nazi authorities in 1941, arguing that her perfume company was now “Jewish property” in the hands of men who had fled — and that she, as an Aryan, should be handed control of it.

She tried to use the machinery of Nazi dispossession, the same laws that were stripping Jewish families of property and rights across occupied Europe, to enrich herself by seizing her partners’ company.

It is a genuinely chilling act of opportunism.

And it failed only because the Wertheimers had been clever enough to see the danger coming, legally transferring control of the business to a non-Jewish associate, Félix Amiot, before they fled — putting it just out of Chanel’s grasp.

The Modern Relic

Chanel’s involvement with the Nazis reached its most audacious point late in the war, in a bizarre episode codenamed Operation Modellhut — “Model Hat.”

By 1943, with Germany starting to lose, SS intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg was involved in an effort to explore whether a separate peace approach to Britain might be possible. Chanel’s unique social connections made her useful.

Chanel, in her glittering pre-war life, had been personally acquainted with Winston Churchill, now Britain’s wartime Prime Minister.

So the SS used Chanel as part of a secret initiative: she would attempt to use her personal connection to Churchill to pass along a message that certain SS figures hoped to negotiate a separate peace with Britain.

Chanel threw herself into it, even arranging for a friend, Vera Bate Lombardi, to be released from an Italian prison to serve as a possible go-between.

But the whole scheme collapsed when Lombardi, upon reaching safety, denounced Chanel and her associates to British contacts as Nazi agents.

The fashion designer’s career as an international peace-broker for the SS ended in failure.

When Paris was finally liberated in 1944, France turned on those who had collaborated with the Germans. Thousands of French women who had consorted with German soldiers were dragged into the streets, their heads shaved, and publicly humiliated.

Coco Chanel was arrested and interrogated about her wartime activities.

And then something remarkable happened: after just a few hours, she was released, and never seriously punished.

Exactly why has never been fully explained.

There is a persistent story that Churchill himself intervened, unwilling to see the embarrassment of a public trial that might expose secret peace approaches. But no definitive documentary proof of Churchill’s intervention has been found.

What is certain is that Chanel avoided the kind of public reckoning faced by many collaborators.

She quietly slipped away into exile in Switzerland for several years, and the whole ugly business was allowed to fade.

And fade it did.

In the 1950s, Coco Chanel returned to Paris and staged a triumphant comeback, reclaiming her throne as the queen of fashion. The public embraced her once more, her wartime record conveniently buried and forgotten, and she lived out her life as a beloved icon, dying in 1971 at the Ritz — the very hotel where she had lived among Nazi officers three decades before.

There is one last telling detail.

After the war, Chanel paid for some of the medical care of her old SS contact, Walter Schellenberg, and reportedly contributed to his funeral arrangements when he died in 1952.

The gesture has often been interpreted as an effort to maintain the silence of a man who knew exactly what she had done.

But motive cannot be proven.

So the next time you see that famous interlocking double-C logo, or catch the scent of Chanel No. 5, you might remember the secret hidden beneath the glamour.

The icon of French elegance was, in the darkest years of the 20th century, documented as a German intelligence agent with a number and a codename, a woman who travelled on intelligence business, who tried to use antisemitic laws to seize a Jewish family’s company, and who escaped all serious consequences to be celebrated as a legend.

The brand shines as bright as ever.

The truth behind it is very dark indeed.

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