During the Second World War, the German Luftwaffe used the hotel as local headquarters in Paris. The son of César Ritz, Charles, died in 1976. The last members of the Ritz family who owned the hotel sold it to the Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed in 1979. In August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales and Al-Fayed's son, Dodi, dined in the hotel's Imperial Suite before their fatal car crash.