Chanel was feted the world over as a pioneering fashion icon who changed the way women dressed and thought about themselves.
Her life has been the subject of countless biographies and films, which have charted her extraordinary career but also her darker side as a Nazi sympathiser and collaborator.
However, according to Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War, the creator of the mythical Little Black Dress was more than this: she was a numbered Nazi agent working for the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence agency.
After sifting through European and American archives, author Hal Vaughan, a Paris-based American journalist, found the celebrated designer had an Abwehr label: Agent F-7124. She also had a code name: Westminster, after her sometime lover with whom she spent weeks salmon fishing in his estate before the war.
Critics have long questioned Chanel's links to the Nazis; she spent most of the war staying at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, sharing close quarters with Nazi general officers, agents, and spies, including Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels.
It is well documented she took as a lover the German officer Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, some 13 years her junior, allowing her to pass freely among restricted areas. When questioned on their relationship she famously told Cecil Beaton: "Really, sir, a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover."
But previous works have depicted her more as an amoral opportunist and shrewd businesswoman than an active collaborator, while Von Dincklage, known by his friends as Spatz – the German for sparrow – has come across as a handsome but feckless mondain, more bent on enjoying the high life that recruiting spies.
Paris American author Hal Vaughan's book, out yesterday in the US, claims not only that Chanel was "fiercely anti-Semitic" even before 1939 but carried out missions on behalf of the Abwehr to Madrid and Berlin during the war, with von Dincklage, some on behalf of SS General Walter Schellenberg, Himmler's right-hand man.
"While French Resistance fighters were shooting Germans in the summer of 1941, Chanel was recruited as an agent by the Abwehr," he writes.
She travelled to Spain with French traitor and trusted German agent Baron Louis de Vaufreland, whose job was to "identify men and women who could be recruited, or coerced, into spying for Nazi Germany.
"Chanel, who knew Sir Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador to Spain, via her relations with the Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, was there to provide cover for Vaufreland's work," the book claims.
He also cites a British secret intelligence report documenting what Count Joseph von Ledebur-Wicheln, an Abwehr agent and defector, told MI6 agents in 1944. In the file, Ledebur discussed how Chanel and Baron von Dincklage travelled to bombed-out Berlin in 1943 to offer Chanel's services as an agent to Heinrich Himmler.
Von Dincklage, meanwhile, is described as a dangerous "Nazi spy master", Abwehr agent F- 8680, who "ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, who honoured him during the war.
The book adds weight to reports that Winston Churchill personally intervened to spare Chanel – a friend from before the war – arrest and trial, despite the fact she was on French resistance "death rosters" as a collaborator. She instead fled to Switzerland, only to return in 1954 to resurrect her reputation and reinvented the House of Chanel.
Chanel, who first learned how to be a seamstress at a Catholic orphanage, was never charged with any wrongdoing and died in 1971.
She is one of numerous esteemed French artists who collaborated with the Nazis – including Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and Edith Piaf.
Her life has been the subject of countless biographies and films, which have charted her extraordinary career but also her darker side as a Nazi sympathiser and collaborator.
However, according to Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War, the creator of the mythical Little Black Dress was more than this: she was a numbered Nazi agent working for the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence agency.
After sifting through European and American archives, author Hal Vaughan, a Paris-based American journalist, found the celebrated designer had an Abwehr label: Agent F-7124. She also had a code name: Westminster, after her sometime lover with whom she spent weeks salmon fishing in his estate before the war.
Critics have long questioned Chanel's links to the Nazis; she spent most of the war staying at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, sharing close quarters with Nazi general officers, agents, and spies, including Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels.
It is well documented she took as a lover the German officer Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, some 13 years her junior, allowing her to pass freely among restricted areas. When questioned on their relationship she famously told Cecil Beaton: "Really, sir, a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover."
But previous works have depicted her more as an amoral opportunist and shrewd businesswoman than an active collaborator, while Von Dincklage, known by his friends as Spatz – the German for sparrow – has come across as a handsome but feckless mondain, more bent on enjoying the high life that recruiting spies.
Paris American author Hal Vaughan's book, out yesterday in the US, claims not only that Chanel was "fiercely anti-Semitic" even before 1939 but carried out missions on behalf of the Abwehr to Madrid and Berlin during the war, with von Dincklage, some on behalf of SS General Walter Schellenberg, Himmler's right-hand man.
"While French Resistance fighters were shooting Germans in the summer of 1941, Chanel was recruited as an agent by the Abwehr," he writes.
She travelled to Spain with French traitor and trusted German agent Baron Louis de Vaufreland, whose job was to "identify men and women who could be recruited, or coerced, into spying for Nazi Germany.
"Chanel, who knew Sir Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador to Spain, via her relations with the Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, was there to provide cover for Vaufreland's work," the book claims.
He also cites a British secret intelligence report documenting what Count Joseph von Ledebur-Wicheln, an Abwehr agent and defector, told MI6 agents in 1944. In the file, Ledebur discussed how Chanel and Baron von Dincklage travelled to bombed-out Berlin in 1943 to offer Chanel's services as an agent to Heinrich Himmler.
Von Dincklage, meanwhile, is described as a dangerous "Nazi spy master", Abwehr agent F- 8680, who "ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, who honoured him during the war.
The book adds weight to reports that Winston Churchill personally intervened to spare Chanel – a friend from before the war – arrest and trial, despite the fact she was on French resistance "death rosters" as a collaborator. She instead fled to Switzerland, only to return in 1954 to resurrect her reputation and reinvented the House of Chanel.
Chanel, who first learned how to be a seamstress at a Catholic orphanage, was never charged with any wrongdoing and died in 1971.
She is one of numerous esteemed French artists who collaborated with the Nazis – including Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and Edith Piaf.