Coco Chanel and the Aryan Laws (Pt 1)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Diversion audio.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
On May fifth, nineteen forty one. Paris was under Nazi occupation.
Charles de Gaul had been exiled from his own country,
and Philippe Patan had set up a proxy government called
the Vishi Administration. They instated the Aryan laws, very similar
to the Nuremberg Laws, that limited and dispossessed Jewish citizens

(00:41):
almost completely. One important aspect of these racist laws was
that Jewish people could not hold businesses. Said businesses were
forfeited to the government. Here is part of one very
notable letter of request from a partial business owner to
the new Nazi party that now governed France. Parfum Chanel

(01:06):
is still the property of Jews, and it has been
legally abandoned by the owners. I have an indisputable right
of priority. The profits that I have received from my
creations since the founding of this business are disproportionate. What
you just heard is part of an English translation of

(01:28):
the letter that Coco Chanel wrote the Nazi administration to
try to take full control of her company and take
it away from her Jewish business partners. Welcome to the

(01:59):
greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer.
Today's episode we're calling Coco Chanel and the Aryan Laws.
It's the story of the famous French fashion designer, but
maybe not as you've heard it before. You're probably at
least somewhat aware of how Coco's designs influenced women's fashion

(02:20):
in the nineteen twenties through the present, and if you're not,
I'll fill you in on that history as well. But
you may not be as familiar with the more shocking
parts of her life, the parts that deal with Nazi collaboration,
the parts to do with invoking the Aryan laws against
her Jewish business partners. Not to worry, I'll tell you

(02:41):
everything I could find about these topics after the break.

(03:09):
I started watching the show The New Look as soon
as it premiered this year. The plot follows two still
famous Parisian designers, Christian Duer and Coco Chanel, as they
both navigate Nazi occupied France. I'll confess at the time,
I didn't know very much about either of them besides
how to pronounce their names, and I knew that only

(03:31):
based on when they were name dropped in rap lyrics.
So I'm not a hardcore apologist for either of them,
to be honest. The show is basically a high fashion
espionage period piece. It was visually stunning and it stars
Ben Mendelssohn and juliette Venoche. So I was sold and
I do recommend the show for sure. What got my

(03:51):
attention to cover the story on our show, though, was
not the gray area in which both designers had to operate,
Chanelle more so than Dior according to the series. But
what got my attention was the reviews I read about
the series afterward. So many of them said the new
look went super easy on Coco Chanel. The most generous

(04:13):
critique said it was quote too easy to call Coco
Chanel a Nazi. Other cited newspapers of her time which
called her a quote vicious anti Semite, and some of
them were like, I mean, when the Allies came to
liberate France, she fled to Switzerland. You do the math,
So this episode is me doing the math. There's this

(04:37):
bit of dialogue in the opening scenes that I think
sort of sums up where we live when it comes
to writing nonfiction.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
Is it true that during the German occupation of Paris,
Kokoschenell closed to hertelier and refused to design dresses for
the wives of Nazis while you kept designing and making money.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
For those who lived through the chaos of war four
years Nazi occupation, darker stays of our lives and just
we did our large designs to him, Nazi whitts and governments.
There is the truth, but there's always another truth that

(05:24):
lives behind them.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
The line has definitely been dramatized. The real man is
not on record having said that. So much of this
is drama, and I do love drama. But today we're
going to try to get to the bottom of the
story of Koko Chanel and the Aryan laws, or at
least as deep as I can go. A couple warnings.
Number one, Koko Chanel was notoriously deceptive. She was very secretive,

(05:55):
and many biographers gave up on her as a subject
because they couldn't get the straight facts from her. So
just keep that in mind as we proceed. Second, we're
a true crime podcast, and technically, at the time, collaborating
with the Nazis in the Nazi occupied France was not
a crime. Don't misunderstand. Though it was exactly wrong, it

(06:18):
was just also legal. So this episode is a bit
of a branch out. I hope you like it, and
I definitely think it's fascinating. Third, there are a lot
of French and German names in these two episodes. I'm
doing my best to pronounce them accurately, but I want
to thank you in advance for your patients when I
mess it up. Seriously, when I went to Paris a

(06:42):
couple years ago, I tried so hard just to read
the words off a menu, and because your girl studied
Spanish in school, I got asked more than once, oh,
are you Catalan, to which I said, Hui, I am
not an incompetent American tourist. I'm definitely Catalan. Anyway, I
appreciate your grace. As we go forward with the many

(07:02):
vowels and silent consonants of the French language, let's start
at the beginning. I won't spend too much time on
her early life, because well, that's not really what our
show is about. I do think it's relevant to know
some of her background, though, so Gabrielle Chanel, that's Coco Later.

(07:27):
She grew up in rural western France and in poverty.
Her mother died when she was eleven, and her father
abandoned the family. She and her sister went to the
Catholic Aubosine Convent orphanage until they moved into a Catholic
boarding house later. I didn't realize this, but at the
time the Catholic Church was largely anti Symitic. That certainly

(07:51):
does not mean that all Catholics were or are anti Semitic,
and the Catholic Church would later officially oppose the Nazi Party. Still,
the Catechism that Coco would have learned taught that it
was the Jews who crucified Jesus, and hearing that in
school doesn't necessarily mean that Coco was antisemitic either, but

(08:13):
it's relevant information. Plus, at the time, the French were
debating the Dreyfus affair, in which a young French artillery
officer of Jewish descent was unfairly accused of passing secrets
to the German embassy and convicted for high treason. He
was not guilty, but even if he had been, I'm

(08:34):
not sure how this one instance spoke for all Jewish
people everywhere. I feel like listeners of this podcast know
enough to know that over generalizations are how racism perpetuates itself,
so I think we can leave this topic alone. For now,
just suffice it to say that antisemitic views were all
around Coco. During her formative years. When she was twenty

(08:56):
years old, Gabriel had two jobs. First, she worked as
a seamstress. Second, she sang and danced at a cabaret cafe.
That's where she got her nickname Coco, from a popular
song she performed. At the time. During Francis Bellipac, cabarets
bloomed from small clubs where men could eat and drink

(09:18):
and be entertained by song and dance into the full
blown venues whose names we still know today, like the
Chat Noir and the Moulain Rouge. Most of the performances
were risque, if not outright scandalous. Even with the new
standards of glamour that were becoming vogue, dancing for entertainment
had always been looked down on by high society. It

(09:41):
was not ladylike to perform the can can or be
paid for attracting attention in that way at all, And
even if the performers were not actually prostitutes, they still
had the stigma about them. Coco wasn't a great singer
or dancer, though she was very charming. Many performers, especially
if they were sex workers. The best case scenario was

(10:05):
to leverage their position in the cabaret into status as
a kept woman. I'm not sure exactly where Coco drew
the line regarding sex work, but she did become a
kept woman, and after a while she turned that status
into a full on patronage. Her first patron's name was
Etienne Balsan. Their relationship was certainly intimate, if not romantic,

(10:30):
but it wasn't long after that when Coco fell in
love with one of Ittien's friends. In nineteen oh eight,
Coco fell in with her second big money patron, Arthur
Edward boy Cappel. He put her in a Paris apartment

(10:54):
and helped her open her first hat shop. Her method
was pretty cool. She went pretty simplistic, well simplistic compared
to European pre war fashions, which were layers and layers
of corsets and frills and feathers and such. She bought
cheap hat bases already made from a wholesaler, and then
she decorated them with minimal accents. It was a big success.

(11:18):
Boy Capel also helped Coco with a more personal matter
after her elder sister completed suicide. Coco wanted her nephew,
Andrea Palas, to be her ward. She and Boy unofficially
adopted him, and Boy arranged for Andrea to attend an
English boarding school. Boy was very good to Coco. He

(11:39):
was a great love of her life for eleven years.
His station in life required him to marry inside his
class in nineteen eighteen, but he and Coco remained lovers
until his later death by a car crash. One thing
Coco had learned while riding horses with Etienne and Boy
was that none of the women's clothes were practical ride

(12:00):
horses in, so Coco wore men's clothes. It's pretty interesting
to me that even back in the nineteen twenties, pockets
were a big feature. In all the photos where she's
modeling her outfits, she has her hands in her pockets.
Pockets were and are very feminist accents for clothes, because
that's where you keep money and keys, which are essentially

(12:23):
the markers of liberation. After the First World War, she
pioneered the nineteen twenties flapper silhouette, the tomboy one with
the shapeless torso and the drop waist that was also
very successful. It's at this point, at the end of

(12:49):
nineteen twenty three with Boy, that Coco met the Duke
of Westminster, Edward, Prince of Wales, who was in line
to inherit the throne of England. From what I can gather,
they had a romance. At the very least, they had
a ten year long relationship of some sort. I'm not

(13:09):
sure how far it went, but I do know that
it was through Prince Edward that she met Winston Churchill.
This is huge later on, so hang on to this information.
It also seems like Winston Churchill kind of sabotaged their
whole thing. He's the one who told Prince Edward straight
up that English society would never accept Coco as one

(13:30):
of their own because of her past. Remember, not only
was Coco working class, she had done sex work, or
at least was associated with it. This is also interesting
to note because, as fans of the crown will remember,
Prince Edward is known as the Abdicator. He was actually
on the throne for less than a year because he
proposed marriage to a married American woman who had already

(13:53):
been divorced once and he couldn't remain the king if
he was married to a divorcee. Times have clearly changed,
but we don't have to go there, at least not yet.
We will get to it, though, But back to the story.

(14:21):
The breakup with the Crown Prince doesn't seem to have
affected Coco all that much, at least not for long.
They stayed acquaintances and she had many lovers. Here are
a few names you might recognize, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso,
Pierre Riverdi, Sergei Diagalov. To recap, that's Igor Stravinsky, the composer,

(14:47):
Pablo Picasso, the painter Pierre Rivardi, the poet Sergei Diagalov
of the Russian Ballet. They're all artists. By the mid
nineteen twenties, she was known as a big patron of
the arts too, even costuming for some of the stage performances.
The Ballet Parade was a success because of her, and

(15:10):
Right of Spring would have run out of funding if
she hadn't come to the rescue, which makes her next
alignment very interesting. During the fallout of the nineteen seventeen
Bolshevik Revolution, class systems were changing in Europe, but Koko
was not down with the Bolsheviks. Even as an artist herself.

(15:32):
She might have been a lover of artists, but she
was also a lover of a grand duke Romanov my
true crime people, let me tell you, I was so
incredibly intrigued to learn that this duke was one of
the guys responsible for murdering Rasputen. Still, many working class
people thought socialism would work in their favor. In theory,

(15:55):
it should, but Koko, though Nuvoich from the world working class,
thought it would wreck her business. Her seamstresses did strike
against her for better wages, and even though the business
recovered well from the strike once the worker's demands were met,
it must have left her with this sour taste. She did, however,

(16:15):
employ several of the white Russians who sought refuge from
their own country in France. One documentary called this a
quote social revenge, the former aristocracy now having to work
for her, But it also could have been sympathy. I

(16:40):
know you've been patiently waiting for me to get to
the point about Coco's potential crimes, so thank you for
your patience. And here we are. We have arrived at
the inciting incident in nineteen twenty four, at the Horse track,
Coco met Pierre and Paul Wrdimer. The brothers were French
Jewish businessmen. They wanted to distribute all her creations, from

(17:04):
her hats to her clothing, but more specifically, the Wardimers
wanted to distribute her famous perfume, Chanell number five. And
there's no way you've gotten through this much of your
life without hearing about Chanelle number five. It was Coco's
first perfume, but it was the fifth one that the
perfumer let her sample, and it was the one she

(17:28):
didn't want to smell like a rose. She didn't want
to smell like lily of the valley. She wanted her
smell to be as complex as a woman, a whole
bouquet of flowers and a sexy animal musk that lingered.
And this scent needed to be practical. It needed to
persist all day, no fading around noon. Number five is

(17:50):
not my personal favorite fragrance, but for all the reasons
listed above, I think it might have been if I'd
been around when it debuted. Flappers at the time certainly
loved it, and it had been growing in popularity and
scarcity since its release in nineteen twenty one. Coco's friend,
thea fil vader, introduced her to the wordimers at the

(18:12):
horse track. She asked them straight up, you want to
produce and distribute perfumes for me? Pierre said, why not.
But if you want the perfume to be made under
the name of Chanel, we've got to incorporate. I'll tell
you all about the deal they struck after the break.

(18:44):
It's awesome when a creative person can find the business
mind to monetize their creations. It's truly a magnificent connection,
each party doing what they do best, working together to
help each other. You've heard of that happening a thousand times, right,
of course not. You've heard of Britney Spears not being
in control of her own life and money, or Taylor

(19:06):
Swift getting screwed in a contract by some intentionally deceptive wording,
Elvis and his manager ripping off artists of color, or
of artists getting very greedy and wanting much more than
their contract entitled. One biographer, Hal Vaughan, said that Chanelle's
quote nonchalance in reaching a deal and agreeing to use

(19:29):
this same lawyer as the warderers to draw up contracts
borders on commercial recklessness. Another biographer even said it was
her idea to relinquish all business control. She told them
they could start a company if they wanted, but she
wanted to be in charge of the designs. Naturally, the

(19:50):
businessmen agreed. In nineteen twenty four, Chanelle turned into a
new French company, Les Parfume Chanel. She turned over the
ownership and rights to manufacture her perfumes, as well as
the formula and methods to produce them. For her part,
she was the new company's president. She held two hundred

(20:12):
fully paid shares, which represented ten percent of the capital,
and she got ten percent of the capital of all
companies that manufactured her creations outside of France, seventy percent
of the outstanding shares went to the wordimers for their
production and distribution, and twenty percent of the shares went

(20:33):
to theofil baters guys. Kind of like a finder's fee. Now,
that would have pissed me off if the guy who
hooked us up made more than I did. But it
didn't seem to bother Coco, at least not yet. She
had agreed to the contract, signed it in front of lawyers,
but by nineteen thirty, after a stint designing costumes in Hollywood,

(20:54):
Coco got more and more unhappy with their deal. She
was not a businesswoman, she said so many times. But
now she was sure that the Wardimer brothers were cheating
her out of the prophets they agreed on, and she
resented the deal they had agreed on seven years earlier.
She said, quote, I let myself be swindled, But those

(21:17):
were the terms she agreed on when she hired French
American attorney Renee de Chambrune to sue the Wartimers in
nineteen thirty. The trial dragged on for years before she
finally lost. Turns out, a contract is a contract. That is,
it was a contract until the outbreak of the Second

(21:38):
World War. Between the times she incorporated with the Wartimers
in nineteen twenty four and the mobilization of French troops

(21:59):
to war and nineteen thirty eight, a lot happened. Fourteen
years happened, but I'm going to condense them into a
few key points for the sake of telling this threat
of the story. Earlier, I mentioned that Coco had tried
to sue her business partners in nineteen thirty, and she failed.
In nineteen thirty four, Cooko moved into a suite at

(22:22):
the Ritz Hotel. Based on the photos, I can tell
you this move was exactly as glamorous and decadent as
it sounds. Her apartment overlooked the Place Vendome. It was
just around the corner from her second apartment, which was
on top of her workspace. From the back entrance of
the Ritz, she had a very short across the street

(22:45):
commute to her salon, and she ate in the dining
room regularly even throughout the later war. In nineteen thirty five,
the Nazis approved the Nuremberg Laws in Germany to recap
That set of laws was aimed at enfranchising the Jewish people.
They deprived Jews of German citizenship, deprived them of the

(23:06):
right to vote, forbade marriage between Jews and non Jewish Germans,
forbade Jews to employ German domestic help, among many other limitations.
It was terrible, Obviously, not everyone thought so. Remember Coco's
old friend Edward, the Prince of Wales. He ascended the

(23:27):
throne in January of nineteen thirty six. While still uncrowned,
he was determined to marry Wallace Simpson, who was an
American divorcee. Parliament was going to block this marriage, so
on December eleventh of the same year, he announced on
a BBC broadcast that he was abdicating the throne. His

(23:50):
friend Winston Churchhill had hoped to talk him out of
marrying Wallace, but he failed. He helped him write the
abdication speech. Eight months later, the exiled Edward, now Duke
of Windsor, and his new wife Wallace, visited Coco at
the Ritz. They were on their way back from vacationing
with Adolf Hitler at his Bavarian retreat. The open secret

(24:14):
that is only somewhat confirmed even now, is that the
Nazis had promised Edward to reinstate him should Britain unite
with Germany. In nineteen thirty eight, most of France believed
war could still be avoided. Adolf Hitler had signed an
agreement with Neville, Chamberlain and Munich, and business was booming

(24:35):
for Coco, and French authorities cracked down on anti French propaganda.
In nineteen thirty nine, France mobilized for war. Nazi agents
like Baron Hans guntervon Dinklaga, also known as Spats, fled
to Switzerland. Coco's beloved nephew Andre went to war fighting

(24:58):
with the French troops. His wife and two daughters stayed
in southern France while he served on the front, and
Coco took care of the family's needs. There were one
hundred and twenty thousand refugees in France at the time,
and most of them were Jewish. In nineteen forty, Coco

(25:27):
evacuated Paris with almost everyone else who could afford to.
She went to her family in Cobert. Seven weeks after
the Nazis entered France, they flew the swastika from the
Eiffel Tower. Coco and her family waited for news from Andre.
They had nothing for weeks. In mid June, the World

(25:49):
War One hero Marshal Piton had asked the Germans for
an armistice. France was now officially occupied by the Nazis. Finally,

(26:11):
Coco and her family got news of Andre via the
Red Cross. Andrea was alive, but he had been captured.
He was a German prisoner of war camp, and he
had contracted tuberculosis. Coco went to Vishi, that's where their
new leader Patan has set up his headquarters. She thought

(26:32):
that she might use some of her influence to get
more information about Andrea. What she found there was that
the Nazis forced Patan to appoint their puppet as a
deputy prime Minister, and just three months later he approved
a new statute on Jews. He also added his own
restrictions on Jews and unoccupied parts of France, banning them

(26:56):
from high public service positions, and it would only grow.
Coco stayed at a friend's hotel room since he had
just been ordered to leave the country. The Vhy administration
had discovered that he'd helped Jews obtain visas to evacuate
to America. Among the Jewish refugees from France were Pierre

(27:17):
and Paul Wortimer. When they arrived in New York by
way of Spain and then Brazil, they sent an emissary

(27:40):
back to France to tidy up their business. First, the
emissary h Gregory Thomas, needed to secure the formula for
Number five and its main ingredients. By the way, if
you're wondering why companies like Coca Cola are so protective
of their recipes to this day, it's because formula for
inventions like perfumes and sodas are not covered by intellectual

(28:02):
property laws, so Gregory had to be stealthy about it.
Gregory also helped Pierre's son Jacques, escape to New York,
and he did one more clandestine maneuver. Let me remind
you that Coco had tried to sue the Wurdimers with
no real basis for argument for years. She had already
betrayed them, even while they were honoring the contract that

(28:26):
she suggested. So it's been four or five years since
the Nuremberg laws, and the Wartimers saw how that worked
out for Jewish companies. So what they did was have
Gregory arbitrate a deal with a French engineer named Felix Amio.
They sold their shares of the company to Felix. Under
the table. Felix sold arms to the Nazi Luftwaffe. No

(28:52):
Germans were coming anywhere close to him. Let me pause
here and reflect for a moment, though, So to recap,
these Jewish businessmen fled their home country for physical safety,
and they essentially broke her to deal with an Aryan
weapons maker to hold onto their company for them until

(29:12):
they were allowed to come back home. On the one hand,
that is a real business person, what incredible foresight strong will,
cool headedness in the face of literal decimation. And on
the other hand, even if I'd had the presence of
mind to reach the option of doing that, I'm not
sure I would have had the strength of spirit to

(29:33):
actually do it. I think I might actually rather go
down with the ship on principle. Of course, if I survived,
i'd certainly live to regret it. But regardless of my
lack of self preservation skills, the Wordomers pulled it off,
and it's a good thing they did, because you're not
going to believe what Coco tried to get away with.
Next I'll tell you all about it after the break.

(30:15):
So in nineteen forty Coco must have known that the
Nazis would use French prisoners of war as bargaining chips
like hostages, because she pulled out all the stops to
get her nephew Andre freed. It's not on record how
Coco met Baron Hans Gunter von Dinklaga, the Nazi espionage agent,

(30:38):
but she did. She met him and Baron Louis de
Vouffrelon in nineteen forty one. It was urgent that Andrea
be freed, especially with his contraction of tuberculosis, and because
she was inventive and opportunistic, Coco was sure that she
could navigate through Nazi occupied Paris. Hans and Louis said

(31:01):
they could help free her nephew for a price. Louis
also implied that with these new Aryan laws he could
probably get her company back out of possession of the Wartimers.
Coco had powerful connections in England, Spain and France, and
in the spring of nineteen forty one, Coco Chanel was

(31:23):
enrolled in the Berlin Channel as agent F seven to
one two four code name Westminster. Coco closed all her
boutiques except her perfume shop, because she explained, people weren't

(31:48):
concerned with fashion when there was a war of this magnitude,
but the perfume stayed because quote, not all Germans were gangsters.
And then interesting, she stayed in Paris. Well, she didn't
just stay in Nazi occupied Paris. She lived at the
Ritz Hotel. You might be thinking, well, she's rich, so

(32:10):
how much of a stretch is that. It's a big stretch,
considering the Nazis had commandeered the Ritz as their headquarters
in Paris. Actually, only certain non Germans were allowed to
stay there, like collaborator Ferne Bideaux, the pro Nazi Dubonet
family and the Ritzes themselves. Everyone coming and going from

(32:33):
the hotel had to be first invited and then identified
as well, and any weapons were confiscated in a cot
check like situation, So she's getting a lot of preferential
treatment already. Chanelle's first mission was to Spain, and while
she was there she stayed at the Ritz in Madrid.

(32:54):
It's impossible to reconstruct her activities while she was there
because France's World War Two archives have all been tragically destroyed,
but British reports say she went to a dinner party
while she was there, and there are some pretty anti
Semitic remarks on the record. When she returned to France,
so had Andre. He was free, but he was very sick.

(33:17):
While he recuperated, Coco and Lewis worked to convince the
Nazis that Chanelle's perfume business rightfully belonged in her hands
according to the Aryan laws. Jewish companies were all surrendered
to the Vichy administration. She wrote to them on her
own behalf, saying Parfum Chanel is still the property of

(33:38):
Jews and has been legally abandoned by the owners. I
have an indisputable right of priority. The prophets that I
have received from my creations since the founding of this
business are disproportionate. Here, I want to pause again because
to me, we're in a bit of a gray area. First,

(33:58):
one might argue that the Madrid mission was a quid
pro quo to save the life of her adoptive son.
Whether that's factually true is somewhat ambiguous. Still, I think
most people could equivocate that the means justified the ends there,
especially because we don't really know what she did on
that mission. Second to the best of Coco's knowledge, she

(34:23):
and the Wordermers were getting screwed by the business's forfeiture.
I can almost not blame her for appealing to the
powers in charge to try to get her own business
back under her control. On the other hand, how bad
does it have to be to align yourself with the Nazis?

(34:43):
I mean, we can't say for sure that she wouldn't
have siphoned money back to Pierre and Paul, or would
have reinstated their contract after the war, Except unfortunately, we
can say that, Remember, Cooco didn't know that the wordimers

(35:07):
had protected their shares of Chanelle parfumes. They'd sold them
to the arms manufacturer Felipe's EMO. When the VS administration
notified her of this fact, she didn't back off. She
doubled down. She said it was a lie with no information.

(35:28):
She said that Pierre was still in control and Felix
was just a figurehead. That is a no. There is
no equivocating for her here. And what's worse, the Nazi
spy Hans Gunter von Dinklaga. He was Koko's lover. She
knew he was a German spy, and she's still kept

(35:50):
on with him for a long long time. And there's
no conceivable way that she didn't know what kind of
man he was. Then she went on a second undercover mission,
this time in nineteen forty three. Coco went to Berlin.
While she was in town, guess where she stayed. This time,

(36:11):
she met with Adolf Hitler's chief of counterintelligence, Walter Schellenberg.
She was supposed to get a message to Winston Churchill.
They called it Operation Model Hat. It was a last
ditch effort for the Nazis to make a deal with
the British, and she was supposed to get the message
to him, but because we're on the other side of

(36:32):
this war, we know what happened. Thank god that mission failed.
It was a matter of time before the war ended.

(36:53):
The Allies came through and liberated Paris all of France.
Charles de Gaul, who was the leader France before Patan
agreed to occupation, returned with the French resistance and everything changed.
Coco Chanel handed out free bottles of Chanel number five
to American Gis for their girlfriends back home. She hoped

(37:16):
that she wouldn't be marched through town naked with her
head shaved for being a horizontal collaborator, and in the meantime,
she would have to figure out how to fly below
the radar after not only having an ongoing affair with
a Nazi officer, but actually working with the Nazis on

(37:36):
several clandestine missions. Join me next week on the Greatest

(38:03):
true crime Stories Ever told for our second of two
episodes about the fashion designer and possible Nazi collaborator, Coco Chanel.
I'd like to shout out a few key sources that
made it possible for me to tell this week's story,
especially the documentary The Wars of Coco Chanel and the
book by Hal Vaughan Sleeping with the Enemy. There's also

(38:27):
the Becoming Chanell documentary. Although, to be honest, our source
list for this episode is pretty exhaustive, so do be
sure to check out our show notes for everyone's expertise.
The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production
of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted

(38:48):
this episode. I also wrote this episode. Our show is
produced by Emma Demuth and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Theme
music by Tyler Cash. Executive producer Scott Waxman

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Episode Transcript

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Coco Chanel and the Aryan Laws (Pt 1)

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