May 13, 2025 • 32 mins
In the second of two parts, we look at the fallout of Coco Chanel's relations with Nazis during their rule over Paris in WW2.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Mary Kay McBrayer
Developed by Scott Waxman, Emma DeMuth, and Jacob Bronstein
Associate Producer is Leo Culp
Produced by Antonio Enriquez
Theme Music by Tyler Cash
Executive Produced by Scott Waxman and Emma DeMuth
Special thanks to:
Carter, Stephen L.. Invisible. Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
Pre-order Mary Kay's forthcoming true crime book 'Madame Queen: The The Life and Crimes of Harlem’s Underground Racketeer, Stephanie St. Clair' here
Check out more on 'Devil's Rooming House' by Hal Vaughn at Penguin Random House
SOURCES
- Albanesi, Melanie. “Coco Chanel: Fashion Designer, Nazi Informant.” PBS. January 3, 2022.
- Pinnock, Olivia. “Do Coco Chanel’s Nazi Connections Matter For Fashion Today?” Forbes.
- James, Caryn. “The truth about Coco Chanel and the Nazis.” BBC. 2024.
- Mah, Ann. “This Picture Tells a Tragic Story of What Happened to Women After D-Day.” Time. June 6, 2018.
- Mazzeo, Tilar J. The Secret of Chanel No. 5. Harper. Nov 9, 2010.
- McAuley, James. “The Exchange: Coco Chanel and the Nazi Party.” The New Yorker. August 31, 2011.
- Paton, Elizabeth. “Chanel Publishes Annual Results for First Time in 108 Years.” The New York Times. June 21, 2018.
- Vaughan, Hal. Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War. Vintage. 2011.
- Wars of Coco Chanel documentary.
- Becoming Chanel documentary.
- Thomas, Dana. “The Power Behind the Cologne.” The New York Times Magazine. Feb 24, 2002.
- Villani, Anna. “WHO OWNS CHANEL? The Wertheimer family. But, who are they?” The Vintage Bar. Jan 7, 2021.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Diversion audio the d Day Landings of June sixth, nineteen
forty four, our standard curricula for American public schools. We
all learned about the Allied victory there. What we didn't
(00:31):
learn about was the wild purge that happened the weeks
and months after the liberation of France. Allied troops swept
through towns to liberate French citizens, and a group of
vigilantes swept through right behind them to punish those who
had collaborated with the Nazis. Some of that mob were
(00:52):
loyal resistance members. Some of them had collaborated themselves and
were anxious to clear their own names before official punishment happened.
One group of the most brutally punished by these vigilantes
were the horizontal collaborators. These were women accused of sleeping
(01:13):
with the enemy. Of course, some women had slept with
Nazi officers, some of them were sex workers, some of
them were raped. Some of them had nothing but the
briefest encounters with German soldiers, but were accused of collaboration
out of personal vendetta. Most of the women accused of
(01:34):
horizontal collaboration were single, unmarried, widowed, or alone because their
husbands were in prisoner of war camps. But all of
those accused were women, and all of those who inflicted
the punishment were men. Their punishment started with public humiliation.
(01:56):
The vigilantes shaved their heads, stripped them half naked, mirrored
them with tar, and marched them through the streets onlookers
taunted them and spat on them, and sometimes they were
even killed. Records show that about six thousand people were
killed during the vigilante justice of the Wild Purge, and
(02:17):
those weren't the serious collaborators, those who committed serious crimes.
They were mostly women who were accused of consorting with
the enemy. Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told.
(02:47):
I'm Mary Kay mcbraer. 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
influence women's fashions in the nineteen twenties through the present,
(03:07):
and if you're not, I'll fill you in on that
history too, 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. This is
part two of the story. So if you haven't heard
part one yet, pause me. Go listen to that first,
(03:30):
and then meet me back here. If you're already caught up,
then you know is about to go down. I'll refresh
your memory on what happened in the first part of
this story, and then I'll tell you everything else that
followed right after the break. In our first episode about
(03:59):
co Go Chanel and the Aryan laws, we talked a
lot about the offenses she committed. This time, we're going
to talk about how officials treated and or punished those offenses.
But I also want to take a minute and address
what might be on a lot of listener's minds as
it pertains to the way we live our individual lives
here and now in the midst of cancel culture, A
(04:23):
lot of listeners might be wondering is it okay to
buy or where Chanel. Obviously, the decision is yours. I
won't tell you what to do one way or the other,
but the ethics of our consumer purchases is something to
consider right I know, I personally hate it when the
media reveals someone whose products I enjoy was a terrible person.
(04:45):
For example, how impossible is it to enjoy the Cosby
Show reruns nowadays, even though there were a ton of
other people who worked on the series, And nothing exists
in a vacuum, and it doesn't necessarily make you a
bad person by proxy. You just can't enjoy stuff in
the same way. Not that Coco Shanell has built Cosby,
but that was the first example I thought of in
(05:07):
which someone that used to give me great joy and
feel good energy God smashed the smotherings. Anyway, we know
that cancel culture as a whole doesn't work, but thoughtful
people like us like to make informed decisions For that reason,
I'm going to extend the story a little bit farther
than we normally do on the show. So yes, we're
(05:28):
going to talk about Coco's offenses and how and if
she was punished. As you likely have deduced, Coco Shanell
is no longer with us, but the Chanelle Company is
very much still alive. So once we've talked about Coco herself,
I'm continuing the narrative to address sort of where the
chips fell. Regarding the Chanelle company itself, don't worry. It's
(05:49):
a suspenseful story full of intrigue, and you'll be glad
we took it all the way to the end. Okay,
When we last left Coco Chanel, she had collaborated with
Nazi spies on two missions. One of them were pretty sure.
(06:10):
She did to free her nephew and adopted son Andre
from a German prisoner of war camp. She had just
found out that he had tuberculosis and his wife and
two daughters were freaking out without him. So not that
it's ever okay to collude with Nazis, but the first
hit is at least somewhat understandable. And then she executed
(06:33):
another mission, this time meeting with Hitler's counterintelligence chief Walter
Schellenberg to try to convey a peace agreement to Coco's
buddy Winston Churchill. Even this we might be able to
equivocate for if she was under duress. What we can't
rationalize on Coco's behalf is that she lived in the
(06:54):
Nazi headquarters. They had commandeered the Ritz Hotel in Paris,
and only very special non Germans were even allowed to
visit let alone live there. Sure, she had lived there
since nineteen thirty, but now no one but Nazis and
their collaborators was at the Ritz. Another untenable fact we
(07:16):
had covered on the last episode. Koko had a romantic
affair with a man whom she knew was a Nazi spy,
and not just once, not just a woke up the
morning after and realized the bedspread was a Swastika quilt.
Before she kicked Rocks on the Ultimate Walk of Shame, no,
Koko had an affair with Hans guntervon Dinklaga for over
(07:38):
a decade. She also tried to invoke the Aryan laws
on her business partners, Pierre and Paul Werdimer. Under the
new laws, Jewish people were not allowed to hold businesses
and they were forfeited to the Vishy administration. Koko wrote
the Nazis to say she was an Aryan and as
a part owner, she should be able to recover the
(08:01):
company herself. This one's pretty incorrigible. I mean, sure, you
might want to save your company, but at what point
is an alliance with the Nazis worth the blast to
your integrity? To make matters more clear, when the VC
administration told her that actually the Wartimers had already sold
their shares to another Aryan owner. Coco did not back off.
(08:24):
She doubled down. She said it was a lie, and
she pushed even harder to try to get the Nazis
to commandeer the company on her behalf. There's no excusing that,
there's no rationalizing with well, maybe she was going to
give it back to them. In the end, she wasn't.
She had already tried to sue them over a contract,
the terms of which she had suggested, saying they committed
(08:47):
a breach that they did not commit, and she failed.
The fact is the Wartimers expected this betrayal and they
were ready for it. Just before Pierre and Paul fled
the Nazi occupation in nineteen forty one, they met with
an old friend. That friend was French engineer Felix Amio,
(09:07):
and the brothers sold Felix their shares of the company
because they knew this was going to happen. Felix was
an engineer who manufactured weapons for the Luftwaffa, so he
was pretty untouchable. But Felix also helped Pierre's son Jacques
escape the German prisoner of war camps. When all the
Werdermers finally made it to New York City by way
(09:30):
of both Spain and Brazil, they sent an emissary from
New York back to Paris. He had retrieved the formula
of the Chanelle Perfume so that they could start manufacturing
number five on American soil. That was not a violation
of their contract. By the way, from what I can deduce,
(09:50):
the reason why they had to sneak back the formula
at all is because they had to literally flee the
country and they probably didn't have time to procure their
recipe on the way. And now you know, Paris was
swarming with Nazis at the time. They probably wouldn't have
taken kindly to anyone trying to help the Jews. How
(10:10):
Gregory got the recipe back remains a secret. He never
shared the exact method, not even after the Wortimers appointed
that emissary as the president of Chanel, and not even
after he worked at the company for thirty seven years.
After the war, and now that the war had ended,
the Wardimers came back to Paris and demanded their company back.
(10:33):
It took several lawsuits, but they got it back. From Felix,
and they also got him off the execution block. He
might have been a collaborator, but he saved their company
for them, and he certainly saved the life of Pierre
sun Jacques. Ultimately, these good turns he did the Wortimers
saved Felix's life when the French government came back to
smoke out collaborators, and that is exactly what they did.
(11:08):
The French resistance's first order of business was to round
up all the French citizens who had collaborated with the
Nazis and prosecute them to the fullest degree. One of
the most vivid images for me personally is the arrest
of all the quote horizontal collaborators, that is, French women
who consorted with the Nazis sexually. Some of these women
(11:30):
had to resort to sex work just to keep from starving,
but they were shown no mercy. The French forces of
the Interior, a largely vigilante group, dragged these women partly
or fully nude from their homes, shaved their heads in
the street, and marked them with a swastika. Coco Chanel,
who was actually a horizontal collaborator, didn't undergo any treatment
(11:53):
like this. Coco's first order of business was dispensing free
bottles of Chanel number five to American gi so they
could give them to their girlfriends back home. You might
be wondering, was that a PR stunt, a survival move,
or a genuine celebration. Why pick just one. I think
it could have been some of all of those motivations,
(12:15):
But of course that's just my opinion, and I'm not
sure it made much difference regardless. Two weeks after the liberation,
Cocoa was arrested for collaboration. After the liberation of Paris,
(12:46):
one French writer calculated that there were between thirty and
forty thousand collaborators executed. First of all, that's a huge number,
and secondly, that is a huge range from what I've read.
The reason why the number of possible executions span a
difference of ten thousand lives is because it was drumhead justice.
(13:11):
Not everyone got a trial. Not At first, collaborators risked
being shot in the street on site. General Charles de
Gaulle ended that hunt by establishing special courts to deal
with collaborators, and he labeled them with the crime national unworthiness.
I feel like I have to reiterate here at the
(13:32):
time when people collaborated with the Nazis during the war,
that wasn't illegal. It wasn't technically a crime. I mean,
it was exactly wrong and evil, but it wasn't illegal.
So when we talk about collaborators as criminals, it's just
something to keep in mind. Even though Paris had been
occupied by Nazis for years, the French resistance still existed,
(13:57):
and now that the city had been liberated from the Germans,
those resistance fighters, most of whom used their own weapons
and wore civilian clothing, had collected into a unit called
the French Forces of the Interior. Coco had been on
the FFI's blacklist for years. She called them the FIFIS.
(14:17):
A handful of these young resistance fighters came to arraign
her at the Ritz in September of nineteen forty four.
By all accounts, she was more insulted by the bad
manners and rude dress of the FFI than her actual arrest.
I just have to say, of course they weren't polite.
(14:37):
Arresting officers don't do that. They might be decent, but
they're not considering your feelings, lady. That's not the priority.
They were there to arrest her, and they themselves had
been hunted down by Nazis for years. Granted, I wasn't
there for the arrest, and I don't know how rude
they were. Coco was interrogated for a few hours, but
(15:00):
the FFIs had no record of her secret work. They
didn't know about her collaboration on the mission to Madrid,
and they didn't know about her involvement in the model
hat mission earlier this same year. And so just like that,
she was released back to her second department she went.
(15:21):
Coco told her niece Gabrielle that her friend Winston Churchill
had her freed. That point has never been proven, although
one theory claims that Chanelle knew Winston had violated his
own Trading with the Enemy Act. The Act criminalized conducting
business with the enemy during wartime, and the rumor was
(15:43):
that Winston paid the Germans to protect the Duke of
Windsor's properties in Paris. To support that theory, the Duke's
property never was touched, not even after he was exiled
and became a governor of the Bahamas. Another theory, and
in my opinion, an equally likely one, is that they
(16:05):
hadn't yet compiled a full case against Coco. So many
of these documents were squirreled away or destroyed or classified
until the twenty tens that she passed the first battery
of questions simply on lack of evidence. But speaking of Edward,
(16:34):
Duke of Windsor. When Coco made it back to her
apartment from that initial investigation, she got a message from
her longtime friend. He said, don't lose a minute, get
out of France. So she left her chauffeur took her
in her Cadillac limousine to Switzerland. This in itself implies
(16:58):
some level of guilt. To me. Again, I wasn't there,
and I don't know how bad it was. The Wild
Purge was still happening, and I'm sure that was a
terrifying crossfire to find one's self in, regardless of actual guilt.
But people in Paris did know about her past, even
if they didn't have the documents in hand to prove it.
(17:20):
They wondered if her luck could hold out. Two years later,
in May of nineteen forty six, officials opened a case
against her. In the decades since, that dossier has disappeared
from the French Justice Department's National archives. The index card
labeled with her name and penal code, though signifies that
(17:43):
the investigation dealt with espionage. Cobol was summoned many times
before she finally appeared before Judge Fernand Paul Leclerc. Now
they had their records. Louis de Vaufrelund had testified Louis
was the guy who had helped Koko free her nephew
Andre from that prisoner of war camp, and Louis had
(18:05):
testified that Koko was collaborating through intelligence, but by this
time Koko had been carefully coached by her lawyers. She
denied that the trip to Madrid had to do with
anything other than opening new boutiques. She claimed that she
never asked Louis for help to free Andre. The judge
(18:25):
brought up that she was on record registered as a
Nazi intelligence agent. Koko said she was never aware of
that registration. The judge did not ask about Operation Model Hut,
which was her trip to speak with the Nazi chief
of intelligence, Walter Schellenberg, and he did not ask about
(18:45):
her wartime relationship with the SS Officer Baron Hans guntervan
din Glaga. Either. Biographers state that it is possible US
intelligence sources may have never shared the facts of Koko
involvement with Model Hunt. Plus the details of her collaboration
were hidden in French, German, Italian, Soviet and US archives.
(19:11):
German authorities even purged French intelligence files as they were
fleeing Paris, and they shipped them first to Berlin and
then to Moscow, and that's where they stayed until nineteen
eighty five, four decades later. The judge did ask about
(19:39):
her attempt to quote get in touch with the Nazi
authorities in charge of the arianization of property or businesses
owned by Jews, in particular about the Werdimer ownership of
ninety percent of the Chanelle perfume business. Coco dodged the question.
She said the Chanel establishments were never sequestrated, there was
(20:02):
a temporary administrator for around three weeks, and the business
aaryanized thanks to a scheme of the Wardimer brothers with
one of their friends. It is possible that Vaferlund overheard
a conversation on this subject, but I didn't ask anything
of him. The questioning about that part of her collaboration
ended there. Apparently the judge did not know about the
(20:26):
trust that the Wardimer set up with Felix Amyo. From
nineteen forty five on, Koco had been buying the silence
of people who knew about her collaboration. What surprises me, though,
is that Pierre and Paul Werdimer didn't say a word.
Pierre had even discovered that Chanel was manufacturing her perfume
(20:48):
in Switzerland. It was a clear breach of their nineteen
twenty four agreement, which entitled them to sole rights of
production and manufacturing, and they didn't push on that either.
The fact that they said nothing is wild to me.
I love having the last word and to be frank.
(21:08):
That is why I will never really be rich. I
would rather be right, But being right is not a
long term win, and the Wordermers, as I continue to reiterate,
were in it for the long haul. In nineteen forty seven,
(21:37):
Pierre and his lawyer met with Coco and Hers in
his offices in Paris. In a move that I can't
really fathom without knowing the future. Pierre offered Coco fifty
thousand dollars and a small additional percentage of sales. It
was a negotiation, so Coco asked for more. By the
(21:59):
end of the talk, they agreed on three hundred and
fifty thousand dollars cash for Coco and two percent of
all sales, not two percent of profits, two percent of sales.
Coco left happy, she told a friend, Now I'm rich.
Coco felt like she had won, and honestly, looking at it,
(22:22):
from my point of view, if the story ended here,
then I would have to agree. But Pierre knew what
he was doing. To recap again, because if you're like me,
his decision just doesn't track without more reflection. Pierre could
have sued the shit out of Coco when she was
on trial for trying to arianize the company. If he
had done that, yes, all of her collaboration would have
(22:45):
come out and she would have likely been punished for
her crimes. But the secret arrangement between the Werdermer's and
Felix am Yo might have come out as well. From
what I can tell, it wasn't illegal, but it was
kind of icky. It might have also exposed their emissary
h Gregory Thomas for his part in the plot as well,
(23:06):
and they ended up making Gregory the company's president for
thirty seven years, So that wouldn't do. And even if
all of that had been above board, or at least
grandfathered in now that the Nazis were out, that negative
press that would come with a court case would have
damaged the company name, and the name Chanelle was the
(23:26):
whole point of the deal. The Wortimers were already established
as perfume makers long before that first meeting with Coco
at the horse Track, but Chanelle number five was their
real money maker. So to simplify, Pierre Wortimer peered into
the future with the foresight of a true business person,
(23:46):
and he chose generational wealth over being right in the moment.
Even with the outcomes in clear, bold face like that,
I'm still not sure I could make the smarter decision
like he did. What truly incredible resolve. A lot of
(24:10):
time passed between this new deal between Coco and the
Wordimers and the next bullet point of our story. So
we're skipping forward eight years. It's nineteen fifty four. Coco
Chanel wanted to comeback, so she came back to Paris
and she debuted her first fashion line since before the
war Listeners. It did not go well. A French reporter
(24:33):
from a major daily magazine wrote, quote, everyone had come
to the show hoping to find again the atmosphere of
the collections that had bowled over Paris in the years
gone by. But there is nothing of that left, only
mannequins who paraded before an audience that cannot bring itself
to applaud yikes. By now, Coco's creations might have been
(24:57):
very successful, but her business was in bad shape financially.
This new collection to supply her comeback had cost thirty
five million francs, which is over one million and one
hundred thousand dollars today, and her show had flopped. So
Pierre stepped in to help again. Coco sold the Wordimers
(25:18):
her shares of the fashion company. She sold them her
commercial real estate and all her holdings with the Chanelle name.
In exchange, the Wordimers paid all her expenses that included
her apartment at the Ritz, her domestic help, and all
other costs of living. In exchange, she had to assist
(25:40):
with the development of new perfumes and run her co
Chuer house. Again, Coco felt like she had won. But listeners,
you know that's not where our story ends. I'll tell
you all about the poetic justice of Coco Chanel and
the Aryan laws right after this break, we left Chanelle.
(26:14):
In nineteen fifty six, just after her return to Paris
Koacher had flopped, Pierre Werdimer stepped in and he bought
her out. Coco still designed, and Pierre paid all her bills,
and they were both happy with this arrangement. They were
especially happy when Coco released the tweed skirt suit. You know,
(26:37):
the one that she's still famous for, the one that
could be seen on everyone whose fashion sense mattered. I
mean Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Romy Schneider, and of course
first Lady Jackie Kennedy true crime people. You know whose
pink tweed suit Jackie O was wearing during President Kennedy's assassination.
(27:02):
You sure do. That tweed skirt suit is still ubiquitous
because it's professional and practical. For decades, famous women wore
the Chanelle suit. Here are some more name drops, Claudia Schiffer,
Barbara Walters, Princess Diana. And while they were wearing the
Chanelle suit, the world forgot about the scandal of Coco
(27:25):
Chanelle's Nazi collaboration, or rather they never knew about it.
In nineteen sixty five, Pierre Wordimer died. He left his
(27:49):
son Jacques, the same one who had escaped France during
the war, in charge of the Chanelle Company and other
business ventures. Coco died just six years later and nighteen
seventy one, in her bed at the Ritz Again. I
want to reiterate, the Chanelle Company was now completely owned
(28:10):
by the Werdimer family. They had bought out the finder's
twenty percent and on her death, with no heirs, Chanelle's
shares went to Pierre or in this case his air.
Now the company's management fell to Jacques because he focused
his attention on other ventures. Though Chanelle languished, but only
for a little while. Just three years later, when they
(28:32):
were twenty five and twenty three, Jacques's son Aline and
Gerrard convinced the members of the board to allow them
to run Chanel. Alan saw the problem. He reigned in
distribution to create scarcity of the long beloved perfume, no
more shelf space in drug stores. Their Sense and New
(28:53):
cosmetics lines would only sell in high end stores. Alan
also insisted on a produced ready to wear line, and
then he hired an incredible ad executive to run their
business in America. It was she that ad exec who
hired Carl Lagerfeld to revitalize the fashion house in nineteen
(29:15):
eighty three, which he did to this day. Alene and
Gerard Wortimer run the Chanelle company. They're quiet people. They
don't sit front row at Chanelle fashion shows. They seldom
talk to the news media, and when they get around Paris,
they typically drive a French hatchback. They live like old
(29:38):
money aristocracy, keeping to themselves, and they're widely known as
fashion's quietest billionaires. I know it's ghosh to talk about
other people's money, but I have to share this beautiful
retribution figure with you. In twenty eighteen, for the first
time in Chanelle's history, the company revealed their sales numbers.
(30:03):
Are you ready? I can't even get my head around
this figure. Nine point six two billion dollars in sales.
At the top of the show, I mentioned that we'd
(30:24):
talk about the ethics of buying Chanel products. I hope
these concluding facts help clear up any doubts for you. I,
for one, would not feel at all guilty for wearing
Chanell creations. In fact, if and when I received compliments,
I would probably recel this whole story in as much
detail as I could remember and as that well intentioned
(30:44):
stranger edged away. I'd tried to air drop them the
link to this episode. So if you're wondering about the
morality of purchasing Chanel products, or if you're wondering whether
your grandmama was a secret Nazi because she wore number five,
I think you can easy join me next week on
(31:25):
the Greatest true crime Stories ever told. For our three
part episode on Susie Newsom Lynch, a woman who came
from a family of wealthy Southern aristocracy and who became
a family annihilator, I'd like to shout out a few
key sources that made it possible for me to tell
this week's two part story about Coco Chanel and the
(31:46):
Aryan Laws. First the two documentaries, The Wars of Coco
Chanel and Becoming Chanel, and then there's hal Vaughan's book
Sleeping with the Enemy. And on top of those, there
are a ton of articles I referenced in The New
York Times, PBS, BBC, The New Yorker, and even trade
magazines like Forbes and The Business Insider. So if you're
(32:07):
interested in this story, please check out our full list
of sources, which are detailed and linked in Our show's
notes The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a
production of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay mcbraer and I
(32:27):
hosted this episode. I also wrote this episode. Our show
is produced by Emma Dumouth and edited by Antonio Enriquez.
Theme music by Tyler Cash. Executive producer Scott Waxman.
Diversion audio the d Day Landings of June sixth, nineteen
forty four, our standard curricula for American public schools. We
all learned about the Allied victory there. What we didn't
(00:31):
learn about was the wild purge that happened the weeks
and months after the liberation of France. Allied troops swept
through towns to liberate French citizens, and a group of
vigilantes swept through right behind them to punish those who
had collaborated with the Nazis. Some of that mob were
(00:52):
loyal resistance members. Some of them had collaborated themselves and
were anxious to clear their own names before official punishment happened.
One group of the most brutally punished by these vigilantes
were the horizontal collaborators. These were women accused of sleeping
(01:13):
with the enemy. Of course, some women had slept with
Nazi officers, some of them were sex workers, some of
them were raped. Some of them had nothing but the
briefest encounters with German soldiers, but were accused of collaboration
out of personal vendetta. Most of the women accused of
(01:34):
horizontal collaboration were single, unmarried, widowed, or alone because their
husbands were in prisoner of war camps. But all of
those accused were women, and all of those who inflicted
the punishment were men. Their punishment started with public humiliation.
(01:56):
The vigilantes shaved their heads, stripped them half naked, mirrored
them with tar, and marched them through the streets onlookers
taunted them and spat on them, and sometimes they were
even killed. Records show that about six thousand people were
killed during the vigilante justice of the Wild Purge, and
(02:17):
those weren't the serious collaborators, those who committed serious crimes.
They were mostly women who were accused of consorting with
the enemy. Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told.
(02:47):
I'm Mary Kay mcbraer. 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
influence women's fashions in the nineteen twenties through the present,
(03:07):
and if you're not, I'll fill you in on that
history too, 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. This is
part two of the story. So if you haven't heard
part one yet, pause me. Go listen to that first,
(03:30):
and then meet me back here. If you're already caught up,
then you know is about to go down. I'll refresh
your memory on what happened in the first part of
this story, and then I'll tell you everything else that
followed right after the break. In our first episode about
(03:59):
co Go Chanel and the Aryan laws, we talked a
lot about the offenses she committed. This time, we're going
to talk about how officials treated and or punished those offenses.
But I also want to take a minute and address
what might be on a lot of listener's minds as
it pertains to the way we live our individual lives
here and now in the midst of cancel culture, A
(04:23):
lot of listeners might be wondering is it okay to
buy or where Chanel. Obviously, the decision is yours. I
won't tell you what to do one way or the other,
but the ethics of our consumer purchases is something to
consider right I know, I personally hate it when the
media reveals someone whose products I enjoy was a terrible person.
(04:45):
For example, how impossible is it to enjoy the Cosby
Show reruns nowadays, even though there were a ton of
other people who worked on the series, And nothing exists
in a vacuum, and it doesn't necessarily make you a
bad person by proxy. You just can't enjoy stuff in
the same way. Not that Coco Shanell has built Cosby,
but that was the first example I thought of in
(05:07):
which someone that used to give me great joy and
feel good energy God smashed the smotherings. Anyway, we know
that cancel culture as a whole doesn't work, but thoughtful
people like us like to make informed decisions For that reason,
I'm going to extend the story a little bit farther
than we normally do on the show. So yes, we're
(05:28):
going to talk about Coco's offenses and how and if
she was punished. As you likely have deduced, Coco Shanell
is no longer with us, but the Chanelle Company is
very much still alive. So once we've talked about Coco herself,
I'm continuing the narrative to address sort of where the
chips fell. Regarding the Chanelle company itself, don't worry. It's
(05:49):
a suspenseful story full of intrigue, and you'll be glad
we took it all the way to the end. Okay,
When we last left Coco Chanel, she had collaborated with
Nazi spies on two missions. One of them were pretty sure.
(06:10):
She did to free her nephew and adopted son Andre
from a German prisoner of war camp. She had just
found out that he had tuberculosis and his wife and
two daughters were freaking out without him. So not that
it's ever okay to collude with Nazis, but the first
hit is at least somewhat understandable. And then she executed
(06:33):
another mission, this time meeting with Hitler's counterintelligence chief Walter
Schellenberg to try to convey a peace agreement to Coco's
buddy Winston Churchill. Even this we might be able to
equivocate for if she was under duress. What we can't
rationalize on Coco's behalf is that she lived in the
(06:54):
Nazi headquarters. They had commandeered the Ritz Hotel in Paris,
and only very special non Germans were even allowed to
visit let alone live there. Sure, she had lived there
since nineteen thirty, but now no one but Nazis and
their collaborators was at the Ritz. Another untenable fact we
(07:16):
had covered on the last episode. Koko had a romantic
affair with a man whom she knew was a Nazi spy,
and not just once, not just a woke up the
morning after and realized the bedspread was a Swastika quilt.
Before she kicked Rocks on the Ultimate Walk of Shame, no,
Koko had an affair with Hans guntervon Dinklaga for over
(07:38):
a decade. She also tried to invoke the Aryan laws
on her business partners, Pierre and Paul Werdimer. Under the
new laws, Jewish people were not allowed to hold businesses
and they were forfeited to the Vishy administration. Koko wrote
the Nazis to say she was an Aryan and as
a part owner, she should be able to recover the
(08:01):
company herself. This one's pretty incorrigible. I mean, sure, you
might want to save your company, but at what point
is an alliance with the Nazis worth the blast to
your integrity? To make matters more clear, when the VC
administration told her that actually the Wartimers had already sold
their shares to another Aryan owner. Coco did not back off.
(08:24):
She doubled down. She said it was a lie, and
she pushed even harder to try to get the Nazis
to commandeer the company on her behalf. There's no excusing that,
there's no rationalizing with well, maybe she was going to
give it back to them. In the end, she wasn't.
She had already tried to sue them over a contract,
the terms of which she had suggested, saying they committed
(08:47):
a breach that they did not commit, and she failed.
The fact is the Wartimers expected this betrayal and they
were ready for it. Just before Pierre and Paul fled
the Nazi occupation in nineteen forty one, they met with
an old friend. That friend was French engineer Felix Amio,
(09:07):
and the brothers sold Felix their shares of the company
because they knew this was going to happen. Felix was
an engineer who manufactured weapons for the Luftwaffa, so he
was pretty untouchable. But Felix also helped Pierre's son Jacques
escape the German prisoner of war camps. When all the
Werdermers finally made it to New York City by way
(09:30):
of both Spain and Brazil, they sent an emissary from
New York back to Paris. He had retrieved the formula
of the Chanelle Perfume so that they could start manufacturing
number five on American soil. That was not a violation
of their contract. By the way, from what I can deduce,
(09:50):
the reason why they had to sneak back the formula
at all is because they had to literally flee the
country and they probably didn't have time to procure their
recipe on the way. And now you know, Paris was
swarming with Nazis at the time. They probably wouldn't have
taken kindly to anyone trying to help the Jews. How
(10:10):
Gregory got the recipe back remains a secret. He never
shared the exact method, not even after the Wortimers appointed
that emissary as the president of Chanel, and not even
after he worked at the company for thirty seven years.
After the war, and now that the war had ended,
the Wardimers came back to Paris and demanded their company back.
(10:33):
It took several lawsuits, but they got it back. From Felix,
and they also got him off the execution block. He
might have been a collaborator, but he saved their company
for them, and he certainly saved the life of Pierre
sun Jacques. Ultimately, these good turns he did the Wortimers
saved Felix's life when the French government came back to
smoke out collaborators, and that is exactly what they did.
(11:08):
The French resistance's first order of business was to round
up all the French citizens who had collaborated with the
Nazis and prosecute them to the fullest degree. One of
the most vivid images for me personally is the arrest
of all the quote horizontal collaborators, that is, French women
who consorted with the Nazis sexually. Some of these women
(11:30):
had to resort to sex work just to keep from starving,
but they were shown no mercy. The French forces of
the Interior, a largely vigilante group, dragged these women partly
or fully nude from their homes, shaved their heads in
the street, and marked them with a swastika. Coco Chanel,
who was actually a horizontal collaborator, didn't undergo any treatment
(11:53):
like this. Coco's first order of business was dispensing free
bottles of Chanel number five to American gi so they
could give them to their girlfriends back home. You might
be wondering, was that a PR stunt, a survival move,
or a genuine celebration. Why pick just one. I think
it could have been some of all of those motivations,
(12:15):
But of course that's just my opinion, and I'm not
sure it made much difference regardless. Two weeks after the liberation,
Cocoa was arrested for collaboration. After the liberation of Paris,
(12:46):
one French writer calculated that there were between thirty and
forty thousand collaborators executed. First of all, that's a huge number,
and secondly, that is a huge range from what I've read.
The reason why the number of possible executions span a
difference of ten thousand lives is because it was drumhead justice.
(13:11):
Not everyone got a trial. Not At first, collaborators risked
being shot in the street on site. General Charles de
Gaulle ended that hunt by establishing special courts to deal
with collaborators, and he labeled them with the crime national unworthiness.
I feel like I have to reiterate here at the
(13:32):
time when people collaborated with the Nazis during the war,
that wasn't illegal. It wasn't technically a crime. I mean,
it was exactly wrong and evil, but it wasn't illegal.
So when we talk about collaborators as criminals, it's just
something to keep in mind. Even though Paris had been
occupied by Nazis for years, the French resistance still existed,
(13:57):
and now that the city had been liberated from the Germans,
those resistance fighters, most of whom used their own weapons
and wore civilian clothing, had collected into a unit called
the French Forces of the Interior. Coco had been on
the FFI's blacklist for years. She called them the FIFIS.
(14:17):
A handful of these young resistance fighters came to arraign
her at the Ritz in September of nineteen forty four.
By all accounts, she was more insulted by the bad
manners and rude dress of the FFI than her actual arrest.
I just have to say, of course they weren't polite.
(14:37):
Arresting officers don't do that. They might be decent, but
they're not considering your feelings, lady. That's not the priority.
They were there to arrest her, and they themselves had
been hunted down by Nazis for years. Granted, I wasn't
there for the arrest, and I don't know how rude
they were. Coco was interrogated for a few hours, but
(15:00):
the FFIs had no record of her secret work. They
didn't know about her collaboration on the mission to Madrid,
and they didn't know about her involvement in the model
hat mission earlier this same year. And so just like that,
she was released back to her second department she went.
(15:21):
Coco told her niece Gabrielle that her friend Winston Churchill
had her freed. That point has never been proven, although
one theory claims that Chanelle knew Winston had violated his
own Trading with the Enemy Act. The Act criminalized conducting
business with the enemy during wartime, and the rumor was
(15:43):
that Winston paid the Germans to protect the Duke of
Windsor's properties in Paris. To support that theory, the Duke's
property never was touched, not even after he was exiled
and became a governor of the Bahamas. Another theory, and
in my opinion, an equally likely one, is that they
(16:05):
hadn't yet compiled a full case against Coco. So many
of these documents were squirreled away or destroyed or classified
until the twenty tens that she passed the first battery
of questions simply on lack of evidence. But speaking of Edward,
(16:34):
Duke of Windsor. When Coco made it back to her
apartment from that initial investigation, she got a message from
her longtime friend. He said, don't lose a minute, get
out of France. So she left her chauffeur took her
in her Cadillac limousine to Switzerland. This in itself implies
(16:58):
some level of guilt. To me. Again, I wasn't there,
and I don't know how bad it was. The Wild
Purge was still happening, and I'm sure that was a
terrifying crossfire to find one's self in, regardless of actual guilt.
But people in Paris did know about her past, even
if they didn't have the documents in hand to prove it.
(17:20):
They wondered if her luck could hold out. Two years later,
in May of nineteen forty six, officials opened a case
against her. In the decades since, that dossier has disappeared
from the French Justice Department's National archives. The index card
labeled with her name and penal code, though signifies that
(17:43):
the investigation dealt with espionage. Cobol was summoned many times
before she finally appeared before Judge Fernand Paul Leclerc. Now
they had their records. Louis de Vaufrelund had testified Louis
was the guy who had helped Koko free her nephew
Andre from that prisoner of war camp, and Louis had
(18:05):
testified that Koko was collaborating through intelligence, but by this
time Koko had been carefully coached by her lawyers. She
denied that the trip to Madrid had to do with
anything other than opening new boutiques. She claimed that she
never asked Louis for help to free Andre. The judge
(18:25):
brought up that she was on record registered as a
Nazi intelligence agent. Koko said she was never aware of
that registration. The judge did not ask about Operation Model Hut,
which was her trip to speak with the Nazi chief
of intelligence, Walter Schellenberg, and he did not ask about
(18:45):
her wartime relationship with the SS Officer Baron Hans guntervan
din Glaga. Either. Biographers state that it is possible US
intelligence sources may have never shared the facts of Koko
involvement with Model Hunt. Plus the details of her collaboration
were hidden in French, German, Italian, Soviet and US archives.
(19:11):
German authorities even purged French intelligence files as they were
fleeing Paris, and they shipped them first to Berlin and
then to Moscow, and that's where they stayed until nineteen
eighty five, four decades later. The judge did ask about
(19:39):
her attempt to quote get in touch with the Nazi
authorities in charge of the arianization of property or businesses
owned by Jews, in particular about the Werdimer ownership of
ninety percent of the Chanelle perfume business. Coco dodged the question.
She said the Chanel establishments were never sequestrated, there was
(20:02):
a temporary administrator for around three weeks, and the business
aaryanized thanks to a scheme of the Wardimer brothers with
one of their friends. It is possible that Vaferlund overheard
a conversation on this subject, but I didn't ask anything
of him. The questioning about that part of her collaboration
ended there. Apparently the judge did not know about the
(20:26):
trust that the Wardimer set up with Felix Amyo. From
nineteen forty five on, Koco had been buying the silence
of people who knew about her collaboration. What surprises me, though,
is that Pierre and Paul Werdimer didn't say a word.
Pierre had even discovered that Chanel was manufacturing her perfume
(20:48):
in Switzerland. It was a clear breach of their nineteen
twenty four agreement, which entitled them to sole rights of
production and manufacturing, and they didn't push on that either.
The fact that they said nothing is wild to me.
I love having the last word and to be frank.
(21:08):
That is why I will never really be rich. I
would rather be right, But being right is not a
long term win, and the Wordermers, as I continue to reiterate,
were in it for the long haul. In nineteen forty seven,
(21:37):
Pierre and his lawyer met with Coco and Hers in
his offices in Paris. In a move that I can't
really fathom without knowing the future. Pierre offered Coco fifty
thousand dollars and a small additional percentage of sales. It
was a negotiation, so Coco asked for more. By the
(21:59):
end of the talk, they agreed on three hundred and
fifty thousand dollars cash for Coco and two percent of
all sales, not two percent of profits, two percent of sales.
Coco left happy, she told a friend, Now I'm rich.
Coco felt like she had won, and honestly, looking at it,
(22:22):
from my point of view, if the story ended here,
then I would have to agree. But Pierre knew what
he was doing. To recap again, because if you're like me,
his decision just doesn't track without more reflection. Pierre could
have sued the shit out of Coco when she was
on trial for trying to arianize the company. If he
had done that, yes, all of her collaboration would have
(22:45):
come out and she would have likely been punished for
her crimes. But the secret arrangement between the Werdermer's and
Felix am Yo might have come out as well. From
what I can tell, it wasn't illegal, but it was
kind of icky. It might have also exposed their emissary
h Gregory Thomas for his part in the plot as well,
(23:06):
and they ended up making Gregory the company's president for
thirty seven years, So that wouldn't do. And even if
all of that had been above board, or at least
grandfathered in now that the Nazis were out, that negative
press that would come with a court case would have
damaged the company name, and the name Chanelle was the
(23:26):
whole point of the deal. The Wortimers were already established
as perfume makers long before that first meeting with Coco
at the horse Track, but Chanelle number five was their
real money maker. So to simplify, Pierre Wortimer peered into
the future with the foresight of a true business person,
(23:46):
and he chose generational wealth over being right in the moment.
Even with the outcomes in clear, bold face like that,
I'm still not sure I could make the smarter decision
like he did. What truly incredible resolve. A lot of
(24:10):
time passed between this new deal between Coco and the
Wordimers and the next bullet point of our story. So
we're skipping forward eight years. It's nineteen fifty four. Coco
Chanel wanted to comeback, so she came back to Paris
and she debuted her first fashion line since before the
war Listeners. It did not go well. A French reporter
(24:33):
from a major daily magazine wrote, quote, everyone had come
to the show hoping to find again the atmosphere of
the collections that had bowled over Paris in the years
gone by. But there is nothing of that left, only
mannequins who paraded before an audience that cannot bring itself
to applaud yikes. By now, Coco's creations might have been
(24:57):
very successful, but her business was in bad shape financially.
This new collection to supply her comeback had cost thirty
five million francs, which is over one million and one
hundred thousand dollars today, and her show had flopped. So
Pierre stepped in to help again. Coco sold the Wordimers
(25:18):
her shares of the fashion company. She sold them her
commercial real estate and all her holdings with the Chanelle name.
In exchange, the Wordimers paid all her expenses that included
her apartment at the Ritz, her domestic help, and all
other costs of living. In exchange, she had to assist
(25:40):
with the development of new perfumes and run her co
Chuer house. Again, Coco felt like she had won. But listeners,
you know that's not where our story ends. I'll tell
you all about the poetic justice of Coco Chanel and
the Aryan laws right after this break, we left Chanelle.
(26:14):
In nineteen fifty six, just after her return to Paris
Koacher had flopped, Pierre Werdimer stepped in and he bought
her out. Coco still designed, and Pierre paid all her bills,
and they were both happy with this arrangement. They were
especially happy when Coco released the tweed skirt suit. You know,
(26:37):
the one that she's still famous for, the one that
could be seen on everyone whose fashion sense mattered. I
mean Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Romy Schneider, and of course
first Lady Jackie Kennedy true crime people. You know whose
pink tweed suit Jackie O was wearing during President Kennedy's assassination.
(27:02):
You sure do. That tweed skirt suit is still ubiquitous
because it's professional and practical. For decades, famous women wore
the Chanelle suit. Here are some more name drops, Claudia Schiffer,
Barbara Walters, Princess Diana. And while they were wearing the
Chanelle suit, the world forgot about the scandal of Coco
(27:25):
Chanelle's Nazi collaboration, or rather they never knew about it.
In nineteen sixty five, Pierre Wordimer died. He left his
(27:49):
son Jacques, the same one who had escaped France during
the war, in charge of the Chanelle Company and other
business ventures. Coco died just six years later and nighteen
seventy one, in her bed at the Ritz Again. I
want to reiterate, the Chanelle Company was now completely owned
(28:10):
by the Werdimer family. They had bought out the finder's
twenty percent and on her death, with no heirs, Chanelle's
shares went to Pierre or in this case his air.
Now the company's management fell to Jacques because he focused
his attention on other ventures. Though Chanelle languished, but only
for a little while. Just three years later, when they
(28:32):
were twenty five and twenty three, Jacques's son Aline and
Gerrard convinced the members of the board to allow them
to run Chanel. Alan saw the problem. He reigned in
distribution to create scarcity of the long beloved perfume, no
more shelf space in drug stores. Their Sense and New
(28:53):
cosmetics lines would only sell in high end stores. Alan
also insisted on a produced ready to wear line, and
then he hired an incredible ad executive to run their
business in America. It was she that ad exec who
hired Carl Lagerfeld to revitalize the fashion house in nineteen
(29:15):
eighty three, which he did to this day. Alene and
Gerard Wortimer run the Chanelle company. They're quiet people. They
don't sit front row at Chanelle fashion shows. They seldom
talk to the news media, and when they get around Paris,
they typically drive a French hatchback. They live like old
(29:38):
money aristocracy, keeping to themselves, and they're widely known as
fashion's quietest billionaires. I know it's ghosh to talk about
other people's money, but I have to share this beautiful
retribution figure with you. In twenty eighteen, for the first
time in Chanelle's history, the company revealed their sales numbers.
(30:03):
Are you ready? I can't even get my head around
this figure. Nine point six two billion dollars in sales.
At the top of the show, I mentioned that we'd
(30:24):
talk about the ethics of buying Chanel products. I hope
these concluding facts help clear up any doubts for you. I,
for one, would not feel at all guilty for wearing
Chanell creations. In fact, if and when I received compliments,
I would probably recel this whole story in as much
detail as I could remember and as that well intentioned
(30:44):
stranger edged away. I'd tried to air drop them the
link to this episode. So if you're wondering about the
morality of purchasing Chanel products, or if you're wondering whether
your grandmama was a secret Nazi because she wore number five,
I think you can easy join me next week on
(31:25):
the Greatest true crime Stories ever told. For our three
part episode on Susie Newsom Lynch, a woman who came
from a family of wealthy Southern aristocracy and who became
a family annihilator, I'd like to shout out a few
key sources that made it possible for me to tell
this week's two part story about Coco Chanel and the
(31:46):
Aryan Laws. First the two documentaries, The Wars of Coco
Chanel and Becoming Chanel, and then there's hal Vaughan's book
Sleeping with the Enemy. And on top of those, there
are a ton of articles I referenced in The New
York Times, PBS, BBC, The New Yorker, and even trade
magazines like Forbes and The Business Insider. So if you're
(32:07):
interested in this story, please check out our full list
of sources, which are detailed and linked in Our show's
notes The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a
production of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay mcbraer and I
(32:27):
hosted this episode. I also wrote this episode. Our show
is produced by Emma Dumouth and edited by Antonio Enriquez.
Theme music by Tyler Cash. Executive producer Scott Waxman.
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