‘Coco Chanel stole my aunt’s furniture’

Ninette, then a teenager, listened to Thorr describe his new bosses. Göring had become a “client” as he plundered paintings belonging to Jews who had fled Paris in l’Exode, when millions took to the roads to flee Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.

Spatz, a spy, valued Thorr’s fluent German, the product of an Alsatian childhood. Chanel liked his style because Yvonne had kitted him out in peaked cap, black jacket, breeches and boots for winter, and a white jacket for summer.

Edgar Dreyfus and Ninette Dreyfus at Cannes[Missing Credit]

Thus, Edgar’s chauffeur watched as Chanel toured the former home of Louise, widow of a textile tycoon, to compile an inventory of spoils. Unlike Edgar, Louise had remained in Paris, thinking a widow need not fear the Germans. She was wrong. Shortly after the Franco-German Armistice in June 1940, they requisitioned her home, possibly because of its location. In one direction it faced the Occupation Army’s headquarters; in another, it faced the offices of the Nazi intellectual Alfred Rosenberg, who competed with Hermann Göring to plunder Jewish-owned art. Initially, she moved to an apartment but French officials evicted her and seized her savings. After that, a widow who in her youth had her own literary and musical salon ended her years in a single-room attic chambre de bonne.

According to Thorr, Spatz had told Chanel: “Here’s a pencil and paper, go and make a list and you’ll have it. It’s yours.” Chanel’s selections were extensive so Spatz told Thorr to deliver the spoils to the Ritz Hotel’s Privatgast section, then reserved for Germany’s French friends. “The world is very small,” concluded Thorr.

Ninette’s immediate family survived the war and she married into Britain’s Montagu banking family. Yet even in her nineties, she could not understand how a couturier with many Jewish clients had plundered Jewish homes at a time when Jews were being deported and killed.

The reality was that Chanel was a vicious antisemite, describing Jews as “youpins”, French for “yids”. Her greatest hatred was for Edgar’s friends the Wertheimer brothers, to whom she sold her perfume business in return for 10 per cent of a new company, Les Parfums Chanel. They turned this into a global success yet Chanel spent the 1930s trying to regain control.

As part of her campaign, she financed Le Témoin, an antisemitic newspaper run by her then lover, Paul Iribe. For one edition, Iribe drew her as Marianne, naked but for her bonnet, being protected by Hitler from Jews. Only the Führer, she believed, could save France from international Jewry and once he had defeated her country she asked the Germans to wrest control of Les Parfums Chanel using France’s Aryanisation programme. This involved French bureaucrats expropriating property, including businesses, town houses and chateaux owned by Edgar’s extended family. Ninette’s own experience of expropriation was equally strange. One day, Edgar received a letter from a German spy called “Otto” Brandl, who gave his address as the family home off Avenue Foch, 24 Square du Bois de Boulogne, once home to Debussy. Avenue Foch was now “Avenue Boche” because Germans were squatting in Jews’ homes, lounging on their furniture, admiring their paintings and dining off their crockery.

Brandl congratulated Edgar on his wine cellar and “thanked” him for making it available. Yvonne was horrified that Germans were sleeping in the family’s beds by night and draining Edgar’s wine cellar by day. Yet Edgar was wryly amused. Years later, Ninette discovered this uninvited house guest had run the Büro “Otto”, which sourced goods for Hitler’s war economy in line with Göring’s instruction: “Turn yourselves into hunting dogs on the trail of anything that might be useful to the German people.”

Once news emerged of the high prices Brandl offered, queues formed outside Ninette’s former home of people wishing to sell goods, rubbing shoulders with the Germans’ French mistresses. It was, however, a risky business so Brandl employed criminals as guards and intermediaries. One based his trading and terror operation at 101 Avenue Henri-Martin, Edgar’s childhood home. Thus, the drawing room where he played the violin with his relative, the young Albert Einstein, echoed to the screams of torture victims.

Benefiting from such methods, Brandl acquired bullion, jewellery and paintings that included two Monets and three Renoirs. For entertainment, he liked Paris’s One-Two-Two brothel, whose bare-breasted waitresses wore only tiny aprons and high heels.

Brandl’s operation outgrew Ninette’s old home. But before he left, he removed the furniture, including Ninette’s doll’s house, a creation made by Henri Lartigue, father of the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue. Brandl took Edgar’s desk while his driver stole Yvonne’s Baccarat crystal. Other items went to a mini-concentration camp in central Paris. There, Jews, including friends of Ninette’s parents, sorted items stolen from Jewish homes for dispatch to Germany though not before the wife of the camp’s commandant had taken her pick.

When Edgar returned to liberated Paris in 1944 he discovered his home had been requisitioned by de Gaulle’s Commissariat aux prisonniers, déportés et réfugiés and the new government refused to return it even though Edgar’s immediate family were refugees and six relatives had been deported.

What, Edgar asked, had become of those relatives? The answer would haunt Ninette until she died. Her cousin, Maryse Schoenfeld, and her husband, André, were gassed at Auschwitz in September 1943. Her uncle, Jacques Lovenbach, was gassed in February 1944. Her father’s cousin, Mariette Dreyfus, and daughter, Nicole, were arrested in May, with Mariette killed at Auschwitz, and Nicole dying later alongside Anne Frank in Belsen. Finally, her aunt, Alice Levy-Sée, was deported and killed in July, just weeks before de Gaulle entered Paris.

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​Ninette’s War – A Jewish Story of
Survival in 1940s France is published
by Profile Books.