Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [174]
In the summer of 1933, von Dincklage was appointed to the post of cultural attaché at the German embassy in Paris. A notoriously vague position, this frequently involved undercover activities. Indeed, by this time, the French Deuxième Bureau, the country’s external military intelligence agency, was constructing a file on von Dincklage. By August 1933, he in turn had sent a propaganda report back to his Nazi superiors in Germany.9
At around this time, Catsy’s younger sister, Sybille, was made party to a conversation that left her deeply shocked. Sitting with her friend Aldous Huxley in Barcelona, awaiting takeoff in a plane bound for Sanary, they were directly behind a well-groomed German couple. After a few moments, Sybille realized they were talking about her sister and von Dincklage. The woman said:
“Maybe they owe him now . . . there always was that rumor of his having been mixed up with some extreme right-wing students’ gang during our Revolution, so called . . . Gave a hand when they put down the Communist putsch, some say he was in at the Rosa Luxemburg murder [in 1919].”
“Too young,” he said. “He may have been there—standing guard by the wall . . . ?”
“When the woman tried to get away through the window,” she said. “You make me shiver . . . He’s very decorative . . . international polish . . . adds up to a reassuring presence for the French. But aren’t we forgetting that his wife’s Jewish?” . . .
“You know, I think I hear that the von Dincklages are divorcing. No one outside Germany is supposed to know.”
“Ah . . . that would square it. Racial purity at home, liberal attitudes abroad. A quick, quiet divorce arranged by our authorities . . .”
[Young Sybille looked at Huxley.] I knew he had understood . . . He put his hand inside his coat and pulled out . . . the leather-bound traveling flask . . . he unscrewed the cap and held it over to me.10
Meanwhile, when von Dincklage officially left his post at the embassy in June 1934,11 he told friends that he had been ejected from his position as cultural attaché because he was married to a Jew. Assuring Catsy that there was nothing personal in his departure, von Dincklage now left her. Catsy loved her husband and was forgiving. She believed von Dincklage’s stories and hoped he would return to her. Meanwhile, she moved back to Sanary, where her mother and stepfather still lived.
Von Dincklage now traveled widely, performing various missions for Hitler’s government in Athens and various Balkan states. He happened to be in Marseille just one day before the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and Foreign Minister Barthou of France. He happened to be in Tunis at a time when systematic and violent anti-French agitation was in progress.12 He also went to stay periodically at Sanary with Catsy. He liked her well enough; he also needed her to keep their separation secret, not wanting her distinguished, and useful, Parisian friends to think ill of him.13 Von Dincklage had been suspected of being an agent in diplomat’s disguise by some at Sanary for a while,14 suspicions eventually to be confirmed. While von Dincklage kept an eye on the activities and whereabouts of the important Jewish émigré community, he was simultaneously collecting information on the nearby port of Toulon, the most important naval base in France.
But von Dincklage had to be seen to have a job. A Russian émigré friend, Alex Liberman—a future friend of Gabrielle’s and eventually editorial director of Condé Nast Publications in New York—found von Dincklage employment as a journalist.15 Then, in 1935, von Dincklage suffered a serious setback in his propaganda work for Hitler’s government. In January of that year, a book entitled Das Braune Netz (The Brown Network) was published in Paris.16 Its subtitle was How Hitler’s Agents Abroad Are Working to Prepare the War, and its aim was to alert the West to the potential “Nazi espionage and fifth column activities outside Germany.” The book