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28. A Nazi Collaborator Who Got Off Light
After the war, French intelligence described Chanel as a Hitler fan and a “vicious anti-Semite“. She was more than that: she was a collaborator and traitor who had directly worked for France’s Nazi occupiers. Declassified documents released decades after her death confirmed that Chanel had worked for both the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and the dreaded Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the intelligence arm of the SS and Nazi Party. Her SD boss was SS General Walter Schellenberg, who was sentenced by the Nuremberg Tribunal to six years for war crimes. After his release in 1951, Chanel supported him and his family financially and paid for his funeral when he died a year later.
When Paris was liberated in 1944, Chanel fled to Switzerland to avoid criminal charges for collaboration with the Germans as a spy. She lived there with her German lover, Baron Dincklage before she returned to France in the 1950s to get back in the fashion business. Ironically, her comeback was financed by Pierre Wertheimer, the Jewish entrepreneur she had tried to screw out of the Parfums Chanel business during the war. Whatever he thought about her as a person, he was the majority owner of a lucrative enterprise and brand and that bore her name. As such, he had a financial stake in the preservation of her image. Her comeback was a success, and the public by and large remained ignorant what kind of person Coco Chanel really was until long after her death in 1971, at age 87.