Was French fashion designer Coco Chanel a Nazi collaborator during the German occupation of France in World War II? A new French documentary called “The Shadow of a Doubt” claims to prove that she was.
Broadcast on French television this week, the documentary revealed for the first time documents from the French Ministry of Defense that show Chanel was a member of Abwehr, Germany’s secret military intelligence agency.
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Other French celebrities of that era including Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier and Sacha Guitry were also implicated as Nazi collaborators.
Historian Henry Gidel told England’s The Mirror, “The revelations about Coco Chanel show the French official line that the country’s stars boycotted the Nazis are a sham.”
Chanel was also said to have been tasked by Hitler with trying to negotiate a peace deal with Churchill since she was a friend of the British Prime Minister. She also had an affair with a high ranking gestapo official Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage who was 13 years her junior. Chanel was 57 when the German occupation of France began in June 1940.
In 1943 Chanel personally traveled to Berlin to offer herself as an agent to SS Chief Heinrich Himmler. Himmler then sent Chanel on a secret mission to Madrid.
Chanel was also accused of trying to use her Nazi connections to cheat the Jewish Wertheimer family out of its share of the Chanel business. But the Wertheimers had already sold out to non-Jews.
