Book alleges Coco Chanel, fashion icon, spied for Nazis

The book, published in the United States on Tuesday by Knopf, has ruffled feathers in France, where the luxury industry is a pillar of the economy and Chanel is widely regarded as the crowning jewel. The House of Chanel was quick to react, saying in a statement that “more than 57 books have been written about Gabrielle Chanel… . We would encourage you to consult some of the more serious ones.’’

Hal Vaughan, an 84-year-old World War II veteran and longtime journalist who previously wrote two other history books, insists that he is serious. “Sleeping with the Enemy’’ is the fruit of more than four years of intense labor born out of an accidental find in France’s national police archive, he said.

“I was looking for something else and I come across this document saying ‘Chanel is a Nazi agent, her number is blah, blah, blah and her pseudonym is Westminster,’ ’’ Vaughan told the Associated Press. “I look at this again and I say, ‘What the hell is this?’ I couldn’t believe my eyes!

“Then I really started hunting through all of the archives, in the United States, in London, in Berlin, and in Rome and I come across not one, but 20, 30, 40 absolutely solid archival materials on Chanel and her lover, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who was a professional Abwehr spy,’’ Vaughan said.

Born in 1883 in a hospice for the poor in France’s western Pays de la Loire region, Gabrielle Chanel had remade herself into the famed couturiere and proudly independent Coco Chanel by the outbreak of World War II. During the conflict, she holed up with von Dincklage, a dashing German officer 12 years her junior who was one in her long string of lovers, in Paris’s Ritz Hotel, which was under Nazi control.