A NEW BOOK about the life of iconic fashion designer Coco Chanel has claimed that she was an active Nazi agent in France during WWII.

Chanel has been linked to the Nazi regime before, mostly through her relationship with a Nazi officer during the occupation of Paris during the war.

Chanel’s relationship with officer Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who was 13 years her junior, allowed her to stay at the Hotel Ritz and enjoy a level of comfort and freedom not experienced by most of her fellow countrymen during the occupation. As such, she has been widely perceived as an opportunistic character rather than genuine Nazi sympathiser.

However, Paris-based American journalist Hal Vaughan’s book, “Sleeping With The Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War,” claims that Chanel was a “fiercely anti-Semitic” active Nazi spy working with Germany’s military intelligence agency – the Abwehr. Vaughan says that European and American archives show that Chanel had an agent label, Agent F-7124, and a code name: “Westminster”, reports the Telegraph.

The Chanel fashion house has commented on the claims, Reuters reports: “What’s certain is that she had a relationship with a German aristocrat during the War. Clearly it wasn’t the best period to have a love story with a German even if Baron von Dincklage was English by his mother and she (Chanel) knew him before the War”.

The Chanel group also cast doubt on the claims that she had been anti-Semitic, pointing out that she had Jewish friends and ties with the Rothschild family.