The best-selling perfume in the world bears the name of a woman who spent the war in the arms of the occupier. Coco Chanel, the untouchable icon of French elegance, did not settle for a carnal proximity with the Third Reich: she became a spy for Adolf Hitler. Far from the legend of the visionary seamstress, the declassified archives of the Defense reveal Agent F-7124 of the Abwehr, codename: "Westminster." While Parisian women endured deprivation and German occupation, Gabrielle Chanel was toasting champagne at the Ritz, which had become the headquarters of the Third Reich, in the arms of Baron von Dincklage, a formidable officer of the German military intelligence. But the designer was not just a lover of collaboration: she was a financial predator who used the racial laws imposed by Hitler to enrich herself. In May 1941, she wrote to the Vichy regime to attempt to steal Parfums Chanel from her associates, the Wertheimer brothers, who had to flee persecution. Her request is one of absolute coldness. She explicitly demands the expropriation of her partners: “Chanel perfumes are still owned by Jews (...) I ask you to grant me the entirety of the shares,” arguing her priority right as an Aryan. Her complicity goes far beyond financial treason. In 1943, the Nazis integrated her into the secret operation "Modellhut." The aim of this mission? To use Chanel's intimate friendship with Winston Churchill to attempt to negotiate a separate peace agreement between the Third Reich and Great Britain. At the Liberation, she was arrested by the Resistance. Yet, she would never be tried or convicted for her active collaboration. She was mysteriously released after a few hours and went to comfortably exile in Switzerland. The reason for this total impunity? The secret intervention of Winston Churchill himself, concerned with stifling a public trial that could have revealed the pro-Nazi sympathies of a part of the British high society. When later questioned about her relationship with the German officer, she swept history aside with this line of nauseating cynicism: “A man, at my age, one does not look at his passport!” The luxury industry today prefers to celebrate the free woman who emancipated bodies with the little black dress. Military records instead tell the story of a fanatical and opportunistic anti-Semite who sold her country to the Third Reich in an attempt to secure the monopoly of her perfume. (translated)
