Some biographers and historians have vilified her for all this, including the late Hal Vaughan in a lurid 2011 book called Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War. Rhonda Garelick, one of the most careful and astute of Chanel biographers, concludes in Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (2014), that she probably believed in the Nazi cause, and was also motivated by expedience, self-interest and antisemitism. “Patriotism had always meant less to her than power,” Garelick writes, and says, “Never did she acknowledge the implications of having tried to invoke the heinous Nazi Aryanisation laws against her own business partners.”
However Justine Picardie, whose Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life was published in a new edition last year, and who has also written a biography of Catherine Dior called Miss Dior (2021), tells BBC Culture, “It’s too easy to say Chanel was a Nazi.” Picardie believes Chanel was too much of an Anglophile and believed too strongly in freedom for her to embrace Nazism, even if she expeditiously used Nazi connections. Operation Modelhut, Picardie says, “is intriguing, but it doesn’t really define her”.
A complicated legacy
The New Look has its own angle, suggesting that Chanel’s collaboration, apart from using the Aryan laws, was mostly reluctant. (She is, after all, a lead character, and they are rarely pure villains.) Our first wartime view of her, in 1943, has her dramatically arriving in the dark of night to get André out of the camp, distraught and frantic, desperate to save her nephew, a sympathetic figure. In this fictional world, she has relied on a Nazi-collaborating friend, Baron Louis de Vaufreland, to arrange the release, and had not fully thought through the consequences. But the Baron soon insists she has to meet Spatz, or he himself will be in danger, and Chanel’s affair with Spatz begins. She is not only willing but quite besotted, oddly naive about his intentions. But she is also increasingly backed into a corner, strong-armed and threatened into joining Operation Modelhut, which she fiercely resists.
