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and his father, Baron Georg-Jito von Dincklage, came from an impoverished but distinguished line. The boy grew up at the family castle in Schleswig-Holstein and, at seventeen, joined his father’s cavalry regiment, the King’s 13th Uhlans. Hans Günther proved himself a gifted horseman—“his body possessed the suppleness of a rider’s”—and he excelled at the game of polo.2 After fighting on the Russian front during the First World War, he was a senior lieutenant at its conclusion. Lacking any civilian education and without a profession to look forward to, he drifted into a series of occupations. It appears he had few qualms about how principled these were. “At first he was a member of one of those volunteer corps which organized civil war in the Republic and for years threatened it with uprisings . . . then, during the inflation he turned his hand to profiteering.”3

By 1924, he had joined a textile manufacturer with whom his family had important interests, and he represented the firm in various European countries, including Switzerland. In that same year, von Dincklage had seduced a well-born young woman, Maximiliana von Schoenebeck, into running away with him. Catsy, as Maximiliana was often known, was the daughter of Baron von Schoenebeck, an art-collecting aristocrat whose Schloss was at Baden. Catsy’s mother was Jewish. Her half sister, the writer Sybille Bedford, described her as “an attractive, happy-natured, life-enhancing, vital young woman,” whose family would come to believe that von Dincklage was “a disaster of lifelong consequences.”4 In 1928, the young couple moved to Sanary, in the south of France. Until a few years before a modest fishing village, Sanary had transformed itself into a select seaside resort. Discovered by a few French artists, including Cocteau, the little town had become particularly popular with von Dincklage’s compatriots.

The stock market crash of 1929 saw him lose his partnership in the textile firm and, in 1930, he was describing himself as “an independent merchant” who had acquired a post in Sanary overseeing transport.5 In early 1933, von Dincklage became the national representative for a French cash register firm, and traveled regularly to Germany, ostensibly to study the cash register’s manufacture. These trips were in fact a cover for what had become the other source of his employment: the new German government.6

Having helped Catsy go through her considerable inheritance, after Hitler’s rise to absolute power, at the beginning of 1933, von Dincklage had “placed his hopes in National Socialism.” As a result, in May of that year, he was resident in Paris with his wife for “the purpose of making contacts.”7 One is drawn to contrast this particular polo player with that other polo-playing lover of Gabrielle’s during the previous war. Arthur Capel had suffered from the ennui of his times and had been capable of emotional carelessness. Yet, drawn into the war and finding himself torn between Gabrielle Chanel and Diana Wyndham, despite his ultimate failure, he was a man who appeared to have grown in emotional and moral stature. Capel and von Dincklage could not have been more different.

With Hitler’s increased hold over Germany, a number of distinguished German Jews made their escape from the Gestapo to Sanary, where they took up exile. Soon the resort became something of an artistic German colony, acquiring the sobriquet “capital of German literature.” Among its illustrious refugees were Mahler’s widow, Alma; Bertholt Brecht; Arnold Zweig; Ludwig Marcuse and the magisterial Thomas Mann and his extended family. A small contingent of English émigrés included Aldous and Maria Huxley, Julian Huxley and his wife, and D. H. Lawrence and his German wife, Frieda.

Catsy’s mother (a hopeless morphine addict) had taken up residence in Sanary with her new Italian husband sometime before, and they had befriended a number of important local German figures, including Ute von Stöhrer, whose husband was then German ambassador in Cairo. Unbeknownst to anyone in Sanary, including Thomas Mann and his family,