Miss Dior: how Christian's younger sister survived Nazi torture and inspired his greatest achievements

The legend of Christian Dior usually begins with the New Look, his debut collection in February 1947 that turned him into a global phenomenon, thanks to his romantic vision of fashion and femininity. Seldom is there any reference to his sister Catherine, the woman he loved most in the world, and the original inspiration for his first perfume, Miss Dior, which was launched in the same year, and continues to be a phenomenally successful best-seller today. 

Yet Catherine’s life was threaded through his, and her wartime courage as a dedicated member of the French Resistance convinced me as a writer that she should be celebrated in her own right, rather than relegated to an incidental footnote in his biography. I was also intrigued as to how Christian’s beguiling concept of beauty had emerged in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, while his sister was still bearing the scars of her hard-fought battle for freedom. 

Catherine was 12 years younger than Christian – he was born in 1905, she in 1917 – but they were the closest of five siblings, with a shared passion from their childhood for gardening, art and music. They had grown up in the prosperous bourgeois surroundings of the family home in Granville, on the coast of Normandy, where their father had inherited a successful fertiliser business. However, this privileged way of life was destroyed when their father lost his fortune in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, and their mother died of septicaemia in 1931, when Christian was 26 and Catherine 14. 

Christian saw it as his responsibility to look after Catherine, and in 1936, they began living together in Paris, where he earned a living as a freelance fashion illustrator, and she worked in a maison de mode, selling hats, gloves and other accessories. Catherine also appears to have been a model for her brother’s early designs; youthful photographs show her wearing a chic black dress and decorative necklace, her dark eyes facing the camera with a characteristically direct gaze, her hair coiffed and eyebrows arched. 

Yet there was nothing of the simpering mannequin about Catherine, and her relationship with Christian was based on a profound friendship, mutual respect and understanding of each other. Thus they discovered the pleasures of bohemian life in Paris in the late Thirties. “Paris had rarely seemed more scintillating,” wrote Christian in his memoir. “We flitted from ball to ball… Fearing the inevitable cataclysm, we were determined to go down in a burst of splendour.”

After the fall of France in 1940, Christian and Catherine retreated to their father’s small farmhouse in rural Provence, where they planted vegetables, as well as tending a field of roses. At the end of 1941, Christian returned to Paris to work for the couturier Lucien Lelong, while Catherine remained in Provence. Soon afterwards, on a trip to Cannes, she met a dedicated member of the French Resistance named Hervé des Charbonneries. It was love at first sight for them both, although Hervé was already married with three children. Along with his mother and his wife Lucie, Hervé was part of an intelligence network known as F2, and Catherine swiftly joined them. In doing so, she became one of an astonishingly small minority of active resistants in France: at most, there were 400,000 (about one per cent of the population); and some intelligence records put the number as low as 100,000. 

Catherine and Hervé were staunch supporters of General Charles de Gaulle, the exiled leader of the Free French, who had embarked on his crusade against the Occupation in June 1940. But F2 had closer links with the Polish and British intelligence services in London, and was one of the most effective networks in supplying vital information about German movements to the Allies. They were also under constant threat from informers and the Milice, a fascist French militia set up by the collaborationist Vichy regime at the beginning of 1943. 

In March 1944, Catherine received a coded message warning her to leave the south of France and travel to Paris, to continue her work for F2 there. She moved into Christian’s apartment on rue Royale, which she used as a safe place for meeting her colleagues in F2. By sheltering his sister and her comrades, Christian was certainly putting himself at risk, not least because rue Royale was at the epicentre of Occupied Paris. It was just across the street from Maxim’s, the fashionable restaurant where German officers dined alongside French collaborators who had enriched themselves through their support for the Nazis. Swastikas flew above the nearby Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe and the Gestapo had seized some of the most prestigious properties in central Paris.

While some fashion houses, including Chanel, closed during the war, much of the couture industry continued to flourish during the Occupation, serving a similar clientele to Maxim’s. Christian Dior’s friend and colleague at Lelong, Pierre Balmain, recorded in his autobiography that their customers “consisted mainly of wives of French officials who had to keep up appearances, and of industrialists who were carrying on business as usual”. He remembered standing with Christian Dior before the first show of 1943, scanning the audience of “women who were enjoying the fruits of their husbands’ profiteering. ‘Just think!’ [Dior] exclaimed. ‘All those women going to be shot in Lelong dresses!’”

As it turned out, it was his sister Catherine who was arrested on July 6 1944, and she suffered grievously at the hands of a gang known as the Rue de la Pompe Gestapo, made up principally of French collaborators, including several women. Their German leader was a nefarious figure named Friedrich Berger, with a background in espionage and extortion, and possessed of a psychopathic capacity for cruelty. 

One of the women, Madeleine Marchand, had managed to infiltrate F2 as a double agent. It was her betrayal that led to the arrest of 26 members of the network. Catherine was the last to be captured; she was seized on the place du Trocadéro by four armed men, forced into their car, blindfolded, and driven to 180 rue de la Pompe. There, in an apartment that had been forcibly requisitioned from its Jewish owners, Berger oversaw a nightmarish system of torture. 

Catherine subsequently gave a witness statement describing her experience: “When I arrived in the building, I was immediately subjected to an interrogation on my activities for the Resistance and also on the identity of the chiefs under whose orders I was working. This interrogation was accompanied by brutalities: punching, kicking, slapping, etc. When the interrogation proved unsatisfactory, I was taken to the bathroom. They undressed me, bound my hands and plunged me into the water, where I remained for about three quarters of an hour.” 

After this terrifying episode, Catherine was transported to Fresnes, a prison on the outskirts of Paris. Two days later, she was taken back to rue de la Pompe, where she was tortured yet again in the bathroom, and submerged in icy water for several hours, until she came close to drowning. On this occasion, Berger’s French mistress, Denise Delfau, who acted as a “secretary” for his operations, took notes of Catherine’s interrogation. After the water torture, Catherine was beaten and made to kneel on triangular wooden rods, with her hands behind her back, her wrists handcuffed. 

Despite these brutal assaults, she gave nothing away, thereby saving the lives of her surviving comrades in the Resistance, and protecting her brother from arrest. Catherine’s records in the Resistance archives refer to her “exemplary courage” when subjected to “particularly odious” forms of torture. Indeed, one of the leaders of F2 initially reported that Catherine had been tortured to death, and paid tribute to her as “an extraordinary young patriot”.

Tragically for Catherine, and another 21 women who had suffered at the hands of Berger’s thugs, it was only the first stage in their terrible ordeal. On August 15 – just 10 days before the Liberation of Paris – Catherine was one of 400 women on the last train of prisoners to be deported from Paris to Germany.  Christian had tried desperately to save her, and held out hopes that, as the Allies gained ground, she might be set free before the train crossed the French border. Instead, she remained locked in an overcrowded cattle truck, with no food or sanitation, and very little water. After travelling for a week in these appalling conditions, Catherine and her companions finally arrived at Ravensbrück on August 22 1944.

This was Hitler’s only concentration camp for women, built in 1939 near Fürstenberg, a small town about 50 miles north of Berlin. It was hidden by scenic woodland and stood beside a serene lake; but those who passed through the camp’s immense iron gates entered a hell on earth. Geneviève de Gaulle, the 23-year-old niece of General de Gaulle and a member of the Resistance, was deported six months before Catherine. “When I was in Fresnes prison there would sometimes be a gleam of light,” she later wrote; “even during the terrible journey to Ravensbrück. But as we went into the camp, it was as if God had remained outside…” About 130,000 women were imprisoned at Ravensbrück over the course of six years. The death toll remains unknown: estimates have ranged from 30,000 to 90,000.

A gas chamber operated at Ravensbrück, but many women were killed by “extermination through labour”, which combined relentless work with starvation and beatings. Catherine endured this punishing scheme, first at Ravensbrück, with its Siemens armaments factory on site, and then at the sub-camp of Torgau, where she was forced to toil in another munitions plant, dipping copper shell cases into deep trays of acid. The 12-hour shifts were exhausting, and the sulphuric fumes damaged Catherine’s lungs; yet even there, she and her companions engaged in secret acts of resistance by sabotaging the machinery, so that every so often it broke down.  

From Torgau, Catherine was transported in a group of 250 Frenchwomen to another sub-camp called Abteroda, where BMW operated an underground facility manufacturing aircraft engines. Conditions were dire: the women slept on a cold cement floor; there were no latrines; rations were minimal (watery soup and dry bread); and they were beaten by SS guards if they worked too slowly. They were also warned that anyone who refused to work would immediately be killed. Yet these women were still determined to resist the Germans, and wherever possible they would insert flaws into the tiny sub-components of the engines.

As the war progressed, and the Allies intensified their bombing campaign against Germany, the Frenchwomen were transferred in February 1945 to yet another satellite camp, this one in Markkleeberg, near Leipzig, where Junkers engines were produced. Once again, they made the slow journey over several days by rail, in freezing goods trucks, without food or water. By now, many were close to death: typhus, typhoid, dysentery and tuberculosis were endemic, and the women were also at risk of diphtheria, pneumonia and meningitis. 

For Catherine Dior, what sustained her was a single fierce desire: to return to the family home she had left in Provence, and see the sunrise and sunset in her own beloved country again. And as the skies above Leipzig were filled with the firestorm of Allied bombing raids, Catherine and her comrades clung to the belief that the war was finally coming to an end. 

On April 13 1945, the SS officers at Markkleeberg received orders to force the prisoners onto what became known as “the death march”. These chaotic evacuations were taking place across Germany, in what was left of Nazi-controlled territory, as Heinrich Himmler had decreed that “No prisoner must fall alive into enemy hands”. The inmates of Markkleeberg were made to trudge in line for days and nights on end, whipped to keep moving by SS guards and threatened by vicious dogs. 

Catherine Dior was amongst those who managed to escape with their lives. On April 21 1945 she slipped away from the death march in Dresden, a city that lay in ruins following weeks of intensive bombing, and was liberated by Soviet troops. It was not until the end of May 1945 that she finally returned to Paris, where Christian was waiting at the railway station to welcome her home. He had never given up hope that she had survived, despite nine months of silence as to her fate. When Catherine stepped off the train, her brother did not recognise her, such was her emaciation. Hervé des Charbonneries was similarly shocked (and would later weep when he told a relative about their reunion). But much to the relief of Hervé and Christian, Catherine began to recover during the course of the summer at her father’s farmhouse in Provence. 

By the autumn of 1945, Catherine was well enough to return to Paris with Hervé, and the couple moved into Christian’s apartment at rue Royale. Both needed to earn a living, and they set up a cut-flower business, supplying florists in Paris; Catherine would rise at 4am, without complaint, to go to the flower market at Les Halles. The stoicism she displayed at work, and her commitment to rebuilding her life after the war, are all the more remarkable in the context of the physical injuries and grave psychological trauma that resulted from her imprisonment in Germany.

Catherine’s return also seemed to bring about a change in Christian; for having shown no particular ambition to have a couture house of his own, in April 1946 he suddenly found the confidence to do so. When he showed his New Look collection, Catherine was watching in the audience, and the floral perfume that he had named in her honour, Miss Dior, was sprayed throughout his elegant premises at 30 avenue Montaigne. 

Dior described his conception of a softly padded silhouette as being inspired by the corolla, a delicate whorl of petals. “In December 1946, as a result of the war and uniforms, women still looked and dressed like Amazons,” he wrote in his memoir. “But I designed clothes for flowerlike women, with rounded shoulders, full feminine busts, and hand-span waists above enormous spreading skirts.” 

In reality, Catherine appeared the very opposite of Amazonian; when she was photographed wearing the uniform of the Free French forces, her face was indescribably sad, reflecting all the horrors she had experienced. If she was Christian’s original flower girl – her arms filled with the scented roses that she grew in Provence – then she was also a heroine who bore witness to the ugly depravity of evil.

Yet at no point did Catherine’s story receive any attention, even when she appeared as a witness at the trial in 1952 of those members of the rue de la Pompe Gestapo who had been tracked down. A similar silence surrounded the fate of many of her compatriots in the Resistance (the women, in particular), as if the shame of the collaboration in France made it too difficult to acknowledge the crimes that been committed against them.  

As for the thousands of staff who had worked at Ravensbrück and the satellite camps, very few were ever prosecuted. The first Ravensbrück trial began in Hamburg in December 1946, while Christian Dior was preparing his debut collection, and the last proceedings took place in July 1948. In total, there were 38 defendants, of whom 21 were women; yet an estimated 3,500 female guards alone had worked at Ravensbrück.  

By the time of Christian’s sudden death of a heart attack in 1957, at the age of 52, he was the most successful designer in the world. He had restored the prestige of French fashion and contributed to his country’s economic recovery, thanks in part to the vast international appeal of Miss Dior.

Christian named Catherine his “moral heir”, and she continued to be as resolute in her loyalty to her brother as she was to the cause of democracy. But Catherine would never boast about her own achievements, nor the medals she had been awarded for her courage, including the Legion d’Honneur that she received in 1994. 

After Christian’s death, Catherine devoted herself to tending the rose fields at the family property in Provence; the annual harvest provided an essential ingredient in the creation of Miss Dior (as is still the case today). Hervé and Catherine remained devoted, but never married, and she continued to live life on her own terms, until she died in 2008 aged 91. Christian had memorably described Miss Dior as “the fragrance of love”, but to my mind, its spirit will be forever emblematic of freedom, too.

‘Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture’ by Justine Picardie will be published by Faber on September 9, RRP £25. Buy now for £19.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514