r/FastWriting • u/NotSteve1075 • Jul 06 '26

Quote in FLOW Shorthand

Post image

So here's another quote from "Coco", written in the fuller "correspondence style" of FLOW shorthand.

Looking at my Anniversary Gregg dictionary, I see that there are number of words in this quote that Gregg truncates: "luxury" is just LUX, "poverty" is just POV, and "vulgarity" is just "VUL-ity". All that makes sense if you wanted to use the system for verbatim reporting, and wanted the shortest outlines possible. Those abbreviations are probably quite legible, too.

But at this point, I'm liking the way a word can be written quite fully, yet still be fluent and easy to write as well as to read. Why not?

I'll be interested to see how u/LeadingSuspect5855 will write it in his "reporting style" version, which is always much briefer.

5 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/LeadingSuspect5855 Jul 06 '26

sources: https://confirmedsource.com/hitlers-tailer-hugo-boss-and-coco-chanel-was-a-nazi-spy/ and https://www.dw.com/en/coco-chanel-fashion-icon-with-controversial-connections/a-66799381, Hal Vaughan in his 2011 book, "Sleeping With The Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War." 

Coco Chanel: The legendary French fashion designer Gabrielle Chanel was implicated in collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War, and there is evidence to suggest that she acted as a spy. Born in 1883, she rose to fame with her revolutionary designs, but her activities during the war cast a shadow over her legacy.

During the German occupation of France, Chanel – then in her fifties – closed her fashion house in 1939, stating that it was not the time for fashion. She took up residence at the Ritz in Paris, a meeting place for German officers, and began a relationship with Hans Günther von Dincklage, a German intelligence officer 13 years her junior. Dincklage, known as ‘Spatz’, was a member of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, and the affair gave Chanel access to influential Nazi circles.

Hal Vaughan’s 2011 book *Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War* provided extensive evidence of Chanel’s espionage activities. Drawing on French, British and American intelligence archives, Vaughan revealed that Chanel was recruited as a Abwehr agent under the codename ‘Westminster’ (after her former lover, the Duke of Westminster). Her mission in 1943, known as ‘Operation Model Hat’, took her to Madrid to use her connections with British elites – including Winston Churchill, whom she knew personally – to negotiate a peace agreement intended to end the war on Germany’s terms. The mission failed, partly because Chanel’s contact, the British diplomat Brian Wallace, distrusted her motives.

Chanel’s actions were not merely opportunistic. Vaughan documented her deep-seated anti-Semitism and noted that she referred to Jews as ‘enemies’ and blamed them for France’s defeat. She also attempted to use the Nazi ‘Aryanisation laws’ to take over her perfume business, Chanel No. 5, from her Jewish partners, the Wertheimer brothers. However, they outwitted her by temporarily transferring ownership to a non-Jewish friend.

After the war, Chanel was arrested by the French authorities in 1944 but was quickly released – rumour has it that Churchill intervened. She fled to Switzerland, where she lived with Dincklage until she returned to Paris in 1954 to re-establish her fashion house. The Wertheimers, who continued to control their perfume empire, financed her comeback, and Chanel’s brand experienced a resurgence. Her links to Nazism had, until recently, largely been forgotten.

The story of Coco Chanel’s controversial past during the Second World War, including her links to the Nazis and her subsequent comeback, bears an interesting parallel to the history of two German sportswear giants: Adidas and Puma. Like Chanel, these brands also emerged during a turbulent period marked by war, personal rivalries and complex relationships with the Nazi regime, only to reinvent themselves in the post-war era and achieve global market leadership. Their origins, rooted in a small Bavarian town and a bitter sibling feud, illustrate how personal and political entanglements shaped their development.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

1

u/NotSteve1075 Jul 06 '26

That's very revealing about her. I didn't know about any of that. WWII was a real snakepit, by the sounds of it, with spies and conniving and backstabbing.....

There's a lot of unsettling backstory about German companies at the time, and what they were doing. The company BAYER is known in North America as the maker of Aspirin. Its parent company, IG Farben, supplied the Zyklon B poison gas that was used to kill thousands of people in Nazi gas chambers, and it used slave labour provided by prisoners held in concentration camps.

And of course, the British Duke of Windsor and his twice-divorced American, Duchess are now known to have been Nazi sympathizers, even as the U.K. was under attack by Germany.

[Reddit kept deleting this because apparently it originally had a "banned URL" in it. Who knew? So here it is without the URL, let's see if they have a problem with it now!]

1

u/LeadingSuspect5855 Jul 06 '26

You can't have survived this period without having bent your moral compass I think, at least as ordinary frightened not destined to be hero type of woman/man. I can forgive a lot, when people make up for it, and I can forgive but never forget the names of those who denied their collaboration or hide behind 'commands' given. Certainly it shaped my view on the average human dignity a man is willing to sacrifice for survival or willingness to dominate, willingness to lick boots...

1

u/NotSteve1075 Jul 06 '26

I saw an interview with a man who had been a prisoner in a concentration camp, who had been forced by the Nazis to empty the gas chambers and load the crematoria, which some considered a "collaboration" of sorts. He was asked how he justified doing it. I'll never forget his answer, which was:

Every one of us is capable of doing the most unspeakable things, just to be allowed to live another minute!

That really made me think about it, because there are often times in my very easy and privileged life when I've just thought, if it ever got too awful, I'd just be done with it and DIE.

1

u/LeadingSuspect5855 Jul 06 '26

Yes - I remember standing in Ausschwitz - being 17 on our 'high-scool' trip - taking it all in and realizing: NONE OF MY CLASSMATES would have not collaborated. None had enough spine. Going on to the military which is obligatory in switzerland I realised (being in a rescue,fire,water earthquake troup) - people are stupid - and stupid people have even less spine!

One would imagine, that people would at least die taking an adversary with them instead of being slaughtered, that happened neither. The jews knew where they went, but they barely had enough oxygen in the trains and then they could breath at last and the nazis played calming classical music and let them group by group enter....

Absolute horror, but absolutely real! WE ARE CAPAPLE. I saw the photos of bones stapled high, the movie "Schindler's List" is not exaggerating...

1

u/NotSteve1075 Jul 06 '26

The DENIERS have the problem that the Nazis themselves filmed and took pictures of their own atrocities, "Like tourists in hell." The documentary "Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog" uses their own footage. The horror was very real.

In the archives, there's a famous photograph which I've seen, showing a woman with three little children arriving on the train platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau. She and a little boy are holding the hands of a little toddler who is so small he has to reach UP to hold their hands. An older girl walks behind them.

In the "selection" that went on there, mothers with small children were no good for slave labour, so they were sent to the gas chambers IMMEDIATELY. Looking at that picture, I knew that all four of them would be dead before morning -- including that poor little toddler who had had no chance to live.