Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [176]
On one occasion, the manager of the hotel was outraged and told von Dincklage to leave his office when he attempted to organize a black-market deal with the hotel to buy German wines. He had said it was “at the request of our mutual friend Joachim von Ribbentrop. You know of course, how important he now is in my government, the Third Reich.” The manager was furious and expelled him from his office. He told his wife that von Dincklage was “free to move around the hotel where I cannot stop him. But I can stop him from access to the offices and the cellars!” He then said to her: “Don’t think I’m suffering from paranoia when I tell you the invasion of France has already begun. That man is a spy!”26 As Germany’s power had grown, von Dincklage presumably felt less concerned about his divorce’s becoming public, which explains his celebration of it at the Ritz.
After the 1938 signing of the Munich pact, when Italy, France and Britain permitted Germany to annex the Sudetenland—effectively allowing it to take over Czechoslovakia—those Jews with enough foresight acted promptly. These included Alex Liberman, who advised all his friends in Paris to cut off relations with von Dincklage and any German nationals whom they knew in France. Liberman had alerted Hélène Dessoffy to the fact that von Dincklage might well be a German spy. On Liberman’s advice, with great reluctance, she ended her affair with von Dincklage. Liberman’s suspicion was now acknowledged by Hélène Dessoffy’s friends, and she was both furious at von Dincklage’s duplicity and depressed at losing her lover.27
According to a Swiss report quoting French intelligence,28 in 1938, von Dincklage was ordered to leave France because he had been “burned” by the Deuxième Bureau. (Although The Brown Network had appeared almost three years earlier, at the time, many of the implicated agents must have convinced the French that it was simply anti-German propaganda.) Von Dincklage, however, soon slipped back into France. At the outbreak of war, he was once again banished, and again went to Switzerland. Until France was occupied, he shuttled back and forth between France and Switzerland, regularly thrown out under suspicion. Continuing surveillance, the Swiss next discovered von Dincklage at a clinic “to cure his nerves,” but noted, “This fact is symptomatic because it is now well-known that German spies have recently adopted this system to escape police control more easily.”29
Shortly after the German occupation of Paris, in 1940, we find von Dincklage again ensconced in his favorite city, this time having acquired the house of one of his most recent lovers, a wealthy Jewish woman who had fled with her husband to the unoccupied south. Police reports confirm that sometime between April and November 1940, von Dincklage had become a “civil servant” in charge of pricing for the textile department of the German military administration in Paris, the MBF. No doubt this cover came about through the auspices of Theodor Momm.30
Shortly after the armistice, in June 1940, when half of Paris, and Gabrielle, took flight in the exodus, Alex Liberman’s Russian lover and future wife, Tatiana du Plessix, also fled to the occupied zone with her small daughter. They eventually met up with Liberman and waited nervously for visas for America. In the meantime, the intrepid Tatiana decided she must make the hazardous trip back to Paris to gather crucial papers and possessions. Lying to Liberman, who would have forbidden her from making the trip had he known, Tatiana said she was going to Vichy to settle the papers of