Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books available on this site.)
COMMENT: A recent incident at a GQ party highlights the role of Third Reich veterans and money in the contemporary German economy.
Comedian Russell Brand was thrown out of an awards ceremony for taking note of the Nazi links of Hugo Boss, the founder of the global clothing giant that carries his name.
Boss began making uniforms for the Nazis in the mid-twenties.
Joining the Nazi Party two years before Hitler’s ascension, Hugo Boss prospered making uniforms for the SS among other Nazi party formations. After the commencement of hostilities, his company made uniforms for the army.
Eventually, Boss’s firm employed forced laborers in its operations, and agreed after the war to pay reparations.
A global force in the fashion industry, the firm undoubtedly operates in conjunction with the Bormann capital network, which dominates corporate Germany and much of the world’s financial and manufacturing infrastructure.
We also note that the international athletic wear brands Adidas and Puma also have Nazi party members as founders. Adolf Dassler and his brother Rudolf were Nazi party members–the latter also allegedly a member of the SS. Adi founded Adidas, Rudolph Puma. (See text excerpts below.)
EXCERPT: There’s nothing like the presence of some Nazis to ruin a perfectly good party.
On Tuesday night, the comedian Russell Brand was thrown out of GQ magazine’s Men of the Year Awards after-show for making jibes about the event’s sponsor, Hugo Boss, and the fashion company’s historic links to the Nazi party.
While on stage, Brand told the gathered celebrities and politicians, ‘If anyone knows a bit about history and fashion, you know it was Hugo Boss who made uniforms for the Nazis.’
He then added, with less than subtle irony, ‘But they looked f***ing fantastic, let’s face it, while they were killing people on the basis of their religion and sexuality.’ . . . .
. . . . . Among one of Boss’s earliest clients was a textiles distributor called Rudolf Born, which commissioned Hugo Boss to produce some brown shirts for an organisation called the ‘National Socialist Party’, later, to become better known as the Nazis.
Style: Hugo Boss is now a global fashion powerhouse
By the late Twenties, the growing Nazi Party had become a good client. And when the Party supplied Hugo Boss (as it did other manufacturers) the production templates for its uniforms, it appears that Boss did not see the relationship in anything but commercial terms.
After all, Boss produced uniforms for many organisations, including the police and the postal service, and the apparently apolitical Boss was happy to make clothes for whoever paid their bills.
However, on April 1, 1931, Boss took a step that would see his name — and brand — forever associated with Nazism. He joined the Nazi Party and was given the relatively low membership number of 508,889.
Boss’s reasons for becoming a Nazi comparatively early were twofold. First, as a businessman, it made commercial sense, as it made it easier for Boss to win contracts from the Nazis who were increasingly coming to dominate every aspect of German life.
Second, Boss believed that Hitler was the only man who could lift Germany out of its economic doldrums.
Such a businesslike attitude was not exceptional. There were certainly better men who refused to do business with the Party, but though Boss was happy to sign contracts with them, he was not a rabid Nazi. He was simply a pragmatist.
Partly thanks to his membership of the party, the Nazis were good to Boss. By 1933, he was able to advertise that he made clothes not only for the SS, but also for the Hitler Youth and the Brownshirts — the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
Then in 1938, business skyrocketed when Boss won contracts to make army uniforms. By 1940, the company was turning over some 1,000,000 Reichsmarks, compared to 200,000 Reichsmarks in 1936.
However, it was still far from being a major manufacturer. In 1940, Boss was employing some 250 workers, which made it a small to medium-sized firm.
Like many, Boss found it hard to find employees during the war, and this is where the story does turn truly dark.
Unable to fill roles, the company found itself employing forced workers from the occupied countries.
During the course of the war, Boss used 140 such labourers and for a period of around eight months from October 1940, the workforce was swelled by 40 French prisoners-of-war.
Although Boss’s factory was not part of a concentration camp — and his labourers were not prisoners — the conditions were dreadful. . . .
. . . . After the war, Boss was ‘de-nazified’. He was classified as an active supporter of Nazism, was fined 100,000 marks, and was stripped of the right to vote and run a business.
However, Boss appealed, and he was eventually classified as a ‘follower’, a lesser category, which meant that he was not regarded as an active promoter of Nazism. . . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . With the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, both Dassler brothers joined the Nazi Party, with Rudolf reputed as being the more ardent National Socialist.[1] Rudolf was drafted, and later captured, while Adi stayed behind to produce boots for the Wehrmacht and then broke away from the Nazi Party.[2] The war exacerbated the differences between the brothers and their wives. Rudolf, upon his capture by American troops, was suspected of being a member of the SS, information supposedly supplied by none other than his brother Adi.[3]
By 1948, the rift between the brothers widened. Rudolf left the company to found Puma on the other side of town (across the Aurach River), and Adolf Dassler renamed the company Adidas after his own nickname. (Adi Dassler). . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . Rudolf Dassler (26 March 1898 in Herzogenaurach, (Germany) — 27 October 1974 in Herzogenaurach) was the German founder of the sportswear company PUMA and the older brother of Adidas founder, Adolf “Adi” Dassler. The brothers were partners in a shoe company Adi started, Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik (Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory). Rudi joined in 1924, however the brothers became rivals following World War II and started their own companies in 1948.
Initially calling the new company “Ruda” (‘Ru’dolf Dassler), it was soon changed to its present name of Puma. Puma is the word for cougar in German as well as other languages, such as Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Polish. . . .
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/coco-chanel-traitor-nazi-spy-4744650
Coco Chanel was a TRAITOR and a Nazi spy who shared her bed with a Gestapo officer
Dec 03, 2014 23:46
By Warren Manger
She might be better known for her perfume and her little black dresses but the iconic French designer had a dark past few know about
She is best remembered as the woman who changed the face of the fashion industry.
But there was another side of Coco Chanel that was every bit as dark as her famous Little Black Dresses.
Newly discovered documents prove she was a Nazi spy who shared a bed with a senior Gestapo officer and tried to convince Britain to end the war.
The Nazis chose her to negotiate a truce with Britain because she was already a friend of Winston Churchill.
And that friendship may have been the only thing that saved her from the revenge of the French Resistance after the war ended.
Official Nazi papers found in French Defence Ministry archives show that Chanel was recruited by the Nazi military intelligence division, the Abwehr, and given an agent number – F‑7124.
She was also given her own code name, Westminster, a reference to her affair with the Duke of Westminster 20 years earlier.spit
The Nazi papers, now the subject of a bombshell new French TV documentary, appear to prove what historians have suspected for many years.
After the war the French government claimed many of the country’s favourite celebrities joined the Resistance, or at the very least boycotted the Nazis after the German army occupied Paris in June 1940.
In reality many cosied up to their new masters.
Historian Henry Gidel says: “The revelations about Coco Chanel show the French official line that the country’s stars boycotted the Nazis are a sham.
“The documentary makers have also raised awkward questions about the connections of singers Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier.”
Piaf and Chevalier are now also suspected to have been Nazi agents and both saw their careers flourish as a result. Piaf even performed a series of private concerts for senior German officers.
The late US historian Hal Vaughan, who lived in Paris and wrote a book about Chanel’s Nazi links, said last year: “Chanel didn’t believe in anything except fashion. She believed in beautiful clothes, she believed in her business. She didn’t care about Hitler or politics or Nazism.
“Chanel was a consummate opportunist. She gravitated to power and the Nazis were in power.
Hulton Archive Winston Churchill (1874 — 1965) accompanied by his son Randolph (1911 — 1968) and Coco Chanel
Friends in high places: Winston Churchill accompanied by his son Randolph and Coco Chanel
“This is definitely something that a lot of people would have preferred to put aside, to forget, to just go on selling Chanel scarves and jewellery.”
During the Nazi occupation of Paris, Chanel lived in a luxurious suite at the Ritz Hotel, which was also the French headquarters of the German air force.
She promptly embarked on an affair with Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a high-ranking Gestapo officer who was honoured by Hitler and propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
He was also an intelligence expert who had been running espionage operations in France during the 1930s.
Chanel was 57 when the occupation began in 1940 and Dincklage was 13 years younger.
But the pair remained lovers for 10 years and fled to Switzerland together after the war.
Chanel was prepared to use her German contacts to protect her wealth and also tried to exploit the grotesque Nazi “Aryanisation” laws which banned Jews from owning businesses.
The designer hoped to snatch back her perfume company and the rights to the famous Chanel No 5 scent, which she had sold to the Jewish Wertheimer brothers in 1924.
However, she was thwarted when she discovered that the Wertheimers, who had already fled to the safety of America, had sold their stake in the business to a non-Jew, invalidating her claim.
Getty Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster
Lovers: Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster
It is now believed that Chanel was enlisted into the Abwehr by the French aristocrat and German double-agent Baron Louis de Vaufreland in the summer of 1941.
He may have cemented her recruitment with a promise that her nephew Andre would be released from a PoW camp.
Her first mission was to go with Vaufreland to Madrid and help him identify Nazi sympathisers and recruit them as potential spies.
Then in 1943 she travelled to Berlin with her Nazi lover to offer her services as a double agent to SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
As a result she was sent to Madrid on a second mission for Himmler himself.
The war had turned against Germany and some Nazis wanted to break with Hitler and negotiate a separate truce with Britain.
Chanel was seen as the perfect person to do that.
After all, she knew British PM Winston Churchill from her days as the lover of Hugh Grosvenor, Britain’s richest man, the 2nd Duke of Westminster and a known anti-Semite.
The Prime Minister had been a regular visitor to the Rosehall Estate, their Scottish love nest, which Chanel had decorated.
But the plan failed because Churchill never responded to her.
Getty Coco Chanel, French couturier. Paris, 1936
Icon: Coco Chanel, French couturier
British intelligence already knew that Chanel had quite literally jumped into bed with the enemy – details of her meetings in Berlin were passed on by a Nazi defector.
Or Churchill may simply have decided he had no time to talk politics with a fashion designer as the Second World War reached its climax.
Historian Henry Gidel says: “Chanel displayed incredible megalomania and naivety in imagining that she could change Churchill’s mind.”
A fortnight after Paris was liberated in August 1944 two men from the French Resistance arrived at the Ritz to escort Chanel, then 61, to the offices of the “clean-up committee” that dealt with Nazi collaborators.
A few hours later she was released.
It was a narrow escape given her wartime exploits, especially as most women who slept with a Nazi were paraded through the streets with their heads shaved.
Several explanations have been put forward to explain why she got off so lightly.
The French authorities were undoubtedly keen to deny that many of their biggest celebrities had done deals with the Nazis as they tried to re-unify the country and restore a sense of national pride.
They are also unlikely to have been privy to secret British files that revealed how deeply the designer had been drawn into the Nazi war machine.
And it has been claimed that Churchill, or even the British royal family, intervened to ensure she escaped punishment.
Getty Edith Piaf
Edith Piaf
According to Chanel’s great-niece Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie she told her family “Churchill had me freed” when she returned home.
Chanel promptly fled to Switzerland with her lover Dincklage, leaving Paris in her chauffeured Cadillac, and only returned to France in 1949, when she escaped punishment for a second time while giving testimony at the trial of the traitor Vaufreland.
She returned to Paris permanently in 1954 and immediately set up home at her wartime residence, the Ritz Hotel, where she lived for the next 17 years until her death.
She even set up her own fashion house financed by none other than Pierre Wertheimer, one of the Jews she had sought to dispossess using Nazi laws during the course of the war.
By the time Chanel died in January 1971, aged 87, she was a true French icon whose designs were coveted around the world.
Jackie Kennedy was wearing one of her pink suits on the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas in 1963.
Chanel was one Nazi agent who really did get away with it, and even her dark past had been airbrushed out of history – until now.