On a shopping trip to Cannes in November 1941, Caro went into a radio shop run by one Georges Papillault, known to his friends as “Hervé/” It was, as Caro sometimes recalled, love at first sight for the two of them. George Papillault, Baron des Charbonneries, was married with three young children but he and his wife, Lucie, seem to have had something of an open marriage. Indeed, the Baroness was said to be “intimate” with the wife of her cousin, the actor Hubert de Lapparent.

The three of them––Hervé, Lucie, and Caro––would also serve with the same Resistance group during the War: the British-sponsored Franco-Polish intelligence network known initially as the Famille and then F2. Records show Hervé as a member of F2 from December 1^st, 1942. His wife Lucie is listed as joining on May 1^st, 1943 and Caro a couple of months later on July 1^st, 1943. However, Hervé Papillault was already a resistant when he met Catherine Dior and lost no time in recruiting her.

Caro is sometimes described as having served with the Massif Central network as a courier and intelligence-gatherer. This work was extremely dangerous because the Vichy regime’s security services were every bit as dedicated, efficient, and savage as their German counterparts. The transfer to F2 of agents like Caro after the Germans entered the Unoccupied Zone in November 1942 and severely curtailed the power of Marshall Pétain’s Vichy regime was logical, F2 being solely concerned with espionage and intelligence.

Set up in the summer of 1940 by Polish military intelligence officers in exile in France and Britain in collaboration with their British counterparts in London and French patriots, was the first functioning French Resistance intelligence-gathering network. By November 1941, just 40 of F2’s 250 agents were Polish. By the time France was liberated in the autumn of 1944, that number had swollen to 2,513, but few Poles remained in the network’s ranks. Eighty-five F2 agents had been killed and 151 deported, including Catherine Dior.

By the summer of 1944, German and Vichy security forces had successfully infiltrated networks like F2 in Southern France, where the spy game was growing in intensity and barbarity in anticipation of the expected Allied invasion of Provence. In June 1944, Caro went to Paris where she stayed in her brother Christian’s apartment on the Rue Royale. Some say that she received F2 contacts there, but this is unlikely for a number of reasons, one being that the French-staffed Gestapo unit that captured Caro on July 6, 1944 ignored her brother.

While films often refer to German and collaborationist security services as “the Gestapo,” an abbreviation of Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo’s activities were largely limited to German soil. The internal security of the Greater German Reich was assured by the Sicherheits-Dienst or Security Service, a sub-division of the SS. However, the French referred to French SD and Police Allemande men by the pejorative diminutive gestapistes.

The Paris SD unit whose agents arrested Catherine Dior consisted of 44 gestapistes of various ethnicities commanded by a German French Foreign Legion veteran named Friedrich Berger, accorded the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer or Captain. Berger’s unit is sometimes called the “Carlingue” although this nickname is also used for another French SD unit in Paris, which was the subject of the 2004 film 93 Rue Lauriston.

Berger’s SD unit set up shop at 180 rue de la Pompe, a few minutes’ walk from the Avenue Foch in the wealthy 16^th arrondissement on April 17th, 1944. In the four months before they fled Paris on August 17^th, 1944, heading east toward Germany, they inflicted serious damage on the Resistance, arresting over 300 agents. One hundred and sixty-three were deported to Nazi concentration camps and 110 died in various ways, including 60 who were shot to death. Berger and his henchmen were either very efficient counter-insurgency operatives or very well-informed by traitors.

F2 suffered badly at the hands of the “Gestapistes de la rue de la Pompe,” who arrested 26 of its agents at the beginning of July, 1944. Jean Cocteau’s friend and lover Jean Desbordes, alias Duroc, was picked up on July 5^th and endured four days of bestial torture before the gestapistes tore his eyes out, beat him to death, and dumped his body in a suburban graveyard. During World War II, Allied secret services reckoned that even the toughest of agents would break after 24 hours of German-style interrogation.

F2 suffered badly at the hands of the “Gestapistes de la rue de la Pompe,” who arrested 26 of its agents at the beginning of July 1944. One of them was Jean Cocteau’s friend and lover the poet and writer Jean Desbordes, alias Duroc. Desbordes was picked up on July 5^th and endured four days of bestial torture before the gestapistes tore his eyes out, beat him to death, and dumped his body in a suburban graveyard. During World War II, Allied secret services reckoned that most agents would break after 24 hours of German-style interrogation.

The French SD men tended if anything to be crueler than their German colleagues and softening-up treatment often began with savage beatings and other forms of assault regardless of the age and gender of their victims before the professional interrogators started asking questions. Other prisoners said that Desbordes did not break. Nor did Catherine Dior.

Caro had arrived at the Place du Trocadero on July 6th to meet another female F2 agent and found two of Hauptsturmführer Berger’s French gestapistes waiting for her. They bundled her into a car and took her to 180 rue de la Pompe. Once Berger’s thugs had finished with her, she was transferred to prison to await deportation to the Nazi gulag. Berger’s unit needed the space. Had Caro been arrested a month later, she might well have been killed by Berger’s men, who would shoot 44 prisoners to death in the Bois de Boulogne the day before fleeing Paris on August 17^th.

Christian Dior made strenuous attempts to secure his sister’s release but none of his well-connected friends and clients were prepared to risk helping him. Dior was working for Lucien Lelong, Robert Piguet having been unable to find room for him when he returned to Paris at the end of 1941. Christian Dior is sometimes described as having “dressed Nazi wives” during the Occupation and it would be a shame to ignore this chance to examine the facts.

Along with Pierre Balmain, Dior worked for Lelong who can fairly be credited with saving Parisian couture from the Nazi regime, which planned at one point to move all of the major Paris couture houses to Berlin. Officially, France and Germany were allies under the terms of the June 1940 armistice and therefore partners in the “New Europe.” Thwarted by the lobbying of Lelong, who was supported by powerful officials in the Vichy government who were not at all pro-German, the Germans then tried to close couture houses down no fewer than 14 times.

In the case of Maison Balenciaga, the Germans succeeded because the house had exceeded its quotas. Strict controls on materials of all kinds had been imposed because of wartime shortages. No fashion house was permitted to produce more than 75 outfits each season and each outfit was further controlled in terms of the amount of materials used in its construction. Despite these constraints and German harassment, couture sales rose by 400% in 1941 and 1942.

How many “Nazi wives” did Christian Dior dress at Lelong while his little sister was risking her life in the Resistance? To gain access to fashion shows in Paris at the time, guests needed a pass issued by the Couture Création group. Of 20,000 such passes in 1942, a mere two-hundred were given to the wives of German officers. These women were usually from German high society and had probably spent as much time in France before the war as their native Germany and Austria.

In other words, they were all paid-up members of the wider European Establishment and would have been on the invitation lists of other society women like the French wife of the German Ambassador to Vichy, Otto Abetz, a keen Francophile who was said to have saved many French people from deportation or worse. Except for Jews, of course, and “terrorists” like Catherine Dior and her comrades.

As American and Free French forces closed in on Paris in August 1944, the ever-efficient Germans speeded up deportations of undesirables to Germany and further east, ably assisted by their French colleagues. On the evening of August 14^th, French prison guards rousted Catherine Dior and other prisoners from their cells and handed them over to French policemen who drove them to the railway marshaling yards in the northeastern Paris suburb of Pantin, the departure point for countless Jews and other unfortunates from the notorious concentration camp at Drancy.

Caro was one of 593 women amongst the 2,197 deportees brought to Pantin that morning from the Paris prisons of Fresnes, Le Cherche-Midi and La Santé by the French police. Just 838 of those men and women would return after the German surrender in May 1945. It was one of the hottest Augusts on record and conditions in cattle wagons into which the policeman and railway employees crammed the prisoners were atrocious. This train is sometimes described as le dernier convoi––the last such trainload of deportees sent east––but it was, in fact, one of several prison trains to leave Paris in the final days of German rule.

In Paris, a frantic Christian Dior had finally found someone brave enough to help by contacting the Swedish Consul Raoul Nordling. Nordling, who would persuade the German military governor of Paris to disobey Adolf Hitler’s directive to destroy the city, had managed to make a deal with the German High Command permitting all political prisoners, including those marked for deportation, to be placed under Swedish protection.

The train’s progress was excruciatingly slow because of the priority given to German troop and supply train movements. Allied air attacks were also an ever-present danger. The Resistance had tried unsuccessfully to stop the train at Dormans on August 17^th. In other words, it had taken almost two days to cover just 60 miles. In the sweltering heat, the combined smells of human misery, overflowing latrine buckets, and death were so overpowering that the SS guards sitting on the wagons were complaining.

A few miles further down the line at Revigny, the stationmaster and representatives of the International Red Cross tried to persuade the SS officer commanding the train to release his prisoners but he refused and the train rolled on, reaching Bar-le-Duc that night, halfway to the German border. The next morning, Nordling succeeded in obtaining a promise from the Germans that he could have Catherine Dior as long as he telephoned Bar-le-Duc and spoke with the train commander before 2: 45 p.m. when the train was scheduled to leave. Nordling’s contact, a Major Huhm, would expect a call from the train commander for confirmation.

Given the chaos, Nordling was unable to obtain a line to Bar-le-Duc in time and the train left. The dutiful train commander had ignored pleas by telephone from no less a personage than Pierre Laval, head of the Vichy government, to turn all of the prisoners over to the Red Cross. There again, Nordling’s efforts might have borne fruit because Red Cross officials had managed to persuade the train commander to release three women and a Catholic priest who was very ill.

Once in Germany, the male prisoners were diverted to Buchenwald, the clearing center for male prisoners, and the women to Ravensbruck, the clearing center for female prisoners. According to the procedure, Caro was stripped and intimately searched for contraband. After a perfunctory medical examination, she was passed through the communal showers before being shaved and tattooed with her number: 57183RA, the suffix standing for Ravensbruck. As a political prisoner, she wore an inverted red triangle on her prison uniform.

Caro was sent to Torgau––known for its infamous military prison––where she was forced to make explosives under very dangerous conditions. She also served time in Abterode, one of Buchenwald’s satellite camps and on the notorious Anton Kommando in a Prussian salt mine. When the Americans liberated Leipzig on April 4^th, 1945, Caro was working in an aircraft parts factory. Like other liberated prisoners, she took to the road. Two weeks later, on April 19^th, 1945, she was rescued by American soldiers near Dresden and hospitalized for a month, which gives some idea of her physical condition.

Late in May 1945, Christian Dior received a telephone call informing him that his sister would be arriving at the Gare de l’Est in Paris the following morning. Dior was deeply shocked when he saw his little sister. Severely emaciated after 10 months of starvation rations, Caro would be unable to digest solid food for several months. She was also suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as we call it today.