“All’s fair in love and war,” might sound like a flimsy excuse for the 10 famous people we’re about to meet, yet many of them truly believed that profiting from the Nazi regime was just another business decision. Some merely tried to survive the terror, while others actively chased wealth by aligning themselves with National Socialism. Below is a countdown of the most notorious examples.
10 The Vuitton Family
The Louis Vuitton boutique was the lone shop allowed to stay open on the ground floor of the Hotel du Parc in Vichy‑occupied France throughout the war. That building served as the headquarters of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s puppet government, and Henry Gaston Vuitton, the designer’s grandson, was nudged to cultivate ties with the Vichy regime to safeguard the business.
Gaston quickly became a regular at the Gestapo’s favorite café nearby and even earned one of the first French decorations from Pétain’s administration. Though the Vuitton archives never mention it, the family has been accused of establishing a factory that churned out 2,500 busts glorifying Pétain’s campaign – perhaps even emblazoned with the iconic LV monogram.
Why These 10 Famous People Matter
9 Hardy Kruger
Most people remember Hardy Kruger for his Hollywood collaborations with John Wayne and Richard Burton, yet his early career was steeped in Nazi‑run cinema.
Like many German boys of his generation, Kruger joined the Hitler Youth at 13. By 15, he had landed a role in the 1944 German film “Young Eagles.” While on set, he grew close to veteran actor Hans Sohnker, who is believed to have shared harrowing details of the Holocaust with the teenager.
At 16, Kruger was drafted into the SS Division Nibelungen. When ordered to execute a group of American soldiers, he froze, prompting an almost‑firing‑squad execution for cowardice. The order was halted, and Kruger escaped his squad, hiding in the mountains until the war’s end.
8 Ferdinand Porsche
When Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933, Ferdinand Porsche unveiled a concept for a compact, affordable vehicle at the Berlin auto show. Hitler, eager to motorise Germany much like Henry Ford had transformed America, seized the idea and announced plans for a “people’s car,” later known as the Volkswagen Beetle.
Under Porsche’s direction, the Wolfsburg plant was flooded with forced labourers – prisoners of war and concentration‑camp inmates – who assembled the Beetle in massive numbers. Porsche’s technical expertise and close ties to the regime allowed him to reap enormous financial rewards while the car became one of the best‑selling models in history.
7 Cristobal Balenciaga
Balenciaga began stitching garments at age three, and the 1940 Nazi invasion of France did little to stall his ambition.
When the occupiers demanded that France’s haute‑couture relocate to Germany, designer Lucien Lelong brokered a compromise: hand over all Jewish designers in exchange for the industry’s continued operation in Lyon and Paris. Balenciaga, though not directly involved in the deal, was among the sixty firms permitted to keep working.
He reopened his Paris house in 1940, thriving thanks to his connections with General Franco, Hitler’s Spanish ally. Balenciaga even crafted the wedding dress for Franco’s granddaughter, cementing his profitable ties to the fascist regime.
6 F. Scott Fitzgerald
By the mid‑1930s, the author of “The Great Gatsby” was drowning in debt, battling alcoholism, and covering his daughter’s upbringing and his wife Zelda’s institutionalisation costs.
In 1936, Hollywood studios were struggling under Nazi censorship, with only MGM, Paramount, and Fox still operating in Germany. When Erich Maria Remarque’s final “Three Comrades” volume hit the U.S. in April 1937, MGM producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz hired Fitzgerald to adapt it for the screen.
Fitzgerald earned $1,000 a week for six months – a hefty sum when the average annual wage was $1,780 – and produced a script that fiercely condemned the rise of National Socialism. Yet the studio sanitized the film, turning it into a glossy anti‑Nazi melodrama that still padded Fitzgerald’s bank account while muting his political message.
5 Hugo Boss
Hugo Ferdinand Boss, founder of the eponymous fashion label, was an outspoken National Socialist who embraced both the party’s ideology and its profit‑making opportunities.
Recent acknowledgments reveal the company’s wartime reliance on forced labour – 140 Poles and 40 French workers – to churn out uniforms. Early contracts supplied the brown shirts for the Nazi stormtroopers, later followed by black and brown garments for the Hitler Youth, and eventually the infamous black SS uniforms.
Those contracts flooded the fledgling firm with riches, and while Boss never personally designed the SS attire, his company’s production became synonymous with the regime’s terror, later inspiring the sleek uniforms of Imperial Officers in “Star Wars.”
4 Henry Ford
It seems odd to pair the emblem of the American Dream, Henry Ford, with the backward dogma of National Socialism.
In 1938, on his 75th birthday, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle – the highest honour a foreigner could receive from the Nazis. Adolf Hitler praised Ford as a personal inspiration, even keeping a life‑size portrait of him on his desk, and cited him admiringly in “Mein Kampf.” German engineers also borrowed Fordist production techniques while building the Volkswagen.
Although Ford harboured anti‑Semitic views, he publicly opposed war and despised the militaristic side of Nazism. Nonetheless, before the United States entered the conflict, he supplied Germany with military equipment while refusing to build engines for Britain’s Royal Air Force.
3 The Rockefellers
Hitler’s obsession with eugenics was not a novel idea; by 1909, California alone had performed nearly half of the world’s coerced sterilizations in the name of “racial hygiene.”
The Rockefeller Foundation, a major patron of eugenic research, funneled $410,000 (about $4 million today) by 1926 to dozens of German scientists. $250,000 of that sum supported the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where Ernst Rudin later directed Hitler’s systematic medical atrocities.
In 1929, a $317,000 Rockefeller grant expanded the Institute for Brain Research, which became the epicentre of Rudin’s murderous experiments. Another beneficiary, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, received Rockefeller money that later enabled Joseph Mengele’s grotesque twin studies.
2 Prescott Bush
Prescott Bush, grandfather of future President George W. Bush, sat on the board of Union Banking Corp., a New York investment bank owned by the German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen family.
Thyssen, enthralled by Hitler after hearing him speak, joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and repeatedly bailed out the fledgling movement. In 1928, he bought Munich’s Barlow Palace, later the Nazi Party headquarters, and his enterprises relied heavily on forced labour from camps like Auschwitz until 1941.
Until the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor, Union Banking Corp. continued financing Thyssen’s steel empire, which produced the planes and tanks that battered the Allies. The firm’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, yet Bush and fellow director Herbert Walker allegedly helped Thyssen transfer ownership documents to New York, shielding him from post‑war prosecution.
1 Coco Chanel
Coco Chanel, famed for her quilted bags, timeless dresses, and the iconic scent Chanel No 5, also dabbled in espionage on behalf of the Nazis.
Although she never embraced Nazi ideology, Chanel gravitated toward power in occupied France, entering a liaison with 44‑year‑old German officer Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a professional Abwehr spy who had been operating in France since the late 1920s.
The relationship was mutually exploitative: Dincklage arranged for Chanel to reside in the luxurious Hotel Ritz, while the designer received the codename “Westminster” and the agent number F‑7124 from the German intelligence service.
Using her new connections, Chanel secured the release of her nephew André Palasse from a German prison camp. She later travelled to Madrid in August 1941 with special German permission to gather political intelligence, though the mission yielded only trivial diplomatic chatter. The next time you picture Chanel measuring a dress in a Parisian atelier, remember she also measured out a brief, opportunistic partnership with the Nazi regime.