Wine And War: The French, The Nazis And The Battle For France's Greatest Treasure Part 1

Wine and War.

The French, the n.a.z.is and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure.

Donald Kladstrup, Petie Kladstrup.

For Regan and Kwan-li, our daughters and inspiration.

List of Ill.u.s.trations.

Using the methods of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, vineyard workers in St. emilion bring in a harvest in the 1940s. "We had a way of living and making wine that was tres ancienne" (Robert Drouhin, Burgundy winemaker). Courtesy of Patrimoine Photographique, Paris.

A family in northern France flees its home, part of an exodus of more than 10 million people that was touched off by the German invasion. "They don't know, n.o.body knows, where they are going" (from the diary of Paul Valery, 1940). Courtesy of Roger-Viollet, Agence Photographique, Paris A bottle of champagne stamped in French and German, "Reserved for the Wehrmacht." Courtesy of Domaine Pol Roger.

A wine cellar in Bordeaux. Winemakers throughout the country walled off part of their caves to hide their best wines from the n.a.z.is. Courtesy of Patrimoine, Photographique, Paris An outdoor soup kitchen in Paris. Courtesy of Patrimoine Photographique, Paris.

Main street of Riquewihr following annexation of Alsace in 1940. "Almost overnight, everything that had been French became German" (Johnny Hugel). Courtesy of A. Hugel "This evening will give us time to recall and glory in one of France's purest treasures, our wine, and to alleviate the misery with which we have had to live for so long" (message to POWs from the program of Gaston Huet's wine fte, 1943).

GIs, fresh from the Normandy landings, take a short rest before pus.h.i.+ng on. "Our foxhole for the night was a cellar. There were beaucoup kegs down there, but they were empty. Boy, were we sad sacks," one soldier said. National Archives photo 111-SC-192224 Hitler's retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Courtesy of Bettmann/Corbis.

Louis Eschenauer, left, at the horse races with a German officer. Courtesy of Heinz Bmers, Jr.

In the early morning hours of December 5, 1944, residents of the Alsatian village of Riquewihr got their first look at their liberators as a unit of Texans rolled to a stop in front of the Hugels' wine store. Courtesy of A. Hugel.

To celebrate liberation, champagne producers no longer stamped their bottles, "Reserved for the Wehrmacht." Now they were marked, "Reserved for Allied Armies." Courtesy of Domaine Pol Roger.

Introduction.

THE STEEL DOOR WOULD NOT BUDGE.

French soldiers had used everything from lock picks to sledgehammers in an effort to open it. Nothing had worked. Now they decided to try explosives.

The blast shook the mountain peak, sending rocks and debris cascading to the valley below. When the smoke and dust had cleared, the soldiers discovered the door was slightly ajar, just enough for Bernard de Nonancourt, a twenty-three-year-old army sergeant from Champagne, to squeeze through. What he saw left him speechless.

In front of him was a treasure connoisseurs would die for: half a million bottles of the finest wines ever made, wines such as Chteau Lafite-Rothschild and Chteau Mouton-Rothschild, Chteau Latour, Chteau d'Yquem and Romanee-Conti, stacked in wooden cases or resting on racks that filled nearly every inch of the cave. In one corner were rare ports and cognacs, many from the nineteenth century.

One thing, however, jumped out at de Nonancourt: hundreds of cases of 1928 Salon champagne. Five years earlier, while working at another champagne house, he had watched in amazement as German soldiers arrived in the little village of Le Mesnil-sur-Oger and hauled away case after case from the cellars of Salon. Now before him was the very champagne he had seen being stolen.

The young sergeant was thrilled and incredulous.

What was also hard to believe was that all this precious wine-sitting in a cave near the top of a mountain-belonged to a man who could not have cared less about it. In fact, he did not even like wine.

That man was Adolf Hitler.

The opening of Hitler's cave that day is something Bernard de Nonancourt would never have imagined; before then, he had not even known the cave existed. On May 4, 1945, Sergeant de Nonancourt, a tank commander in General Philippe Leclerc's 2nd French Armored Division, was only thinking how good it felt to be alive. Just a few days before, de Nonancourt had heard the good news: the last German units in France had surrendered. His country, at long last, was completely free. Now the Allies were pus.h.i.+ng into Germany, their planes dropping thousands of tons of bombs on German industries, airfields and s.h.i.+pyards. Although pockets of resistance remained, German troops were in full retreat and had begun surrendering in large numbers. Everyone knew the war would soon be over.

On that lovely spring day as bright sunlight glinted off newly leafed trees, de Nonancourt's army unit found itself tantalizingly close to its destination: the town of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, the "Valhalla for the n.a.z.i G.o.ds, lords and masters" as historian Stephen Ambrose called it. Hitler had a home here, the Berghof, as well as a mountaintop stone retreat called the Adlershorst, or Eagle's Nest. Other n.a.z.is, like Gring, Goebbels, Himmler and Bormann, also had houses here.

It was to Berchtesgaden that the leaders of Europe had come in the late 1930s to be humiliated by Hitler, leaders such as Schuschnigg of Austria and Chamberlain of Britain. It was also where the n.a.z.is s.h.i.+pped much of their loot: gold, jewelry, paintings and other treasures which they had stolen from other occupied countries.

The centerpiece of this Valhalla was the Berghof, Hitler's abode, which, from all outward appearances, looked like a typical chalet nestled on the shoulder of a mountain. It was anything but. As one visitor said, "Behind those pleasant white walls and the flowers growing in window boxes was a palatial fortress unnerving in its strange inner proportions and medieval grandeur and in its display of wealth and power." The living room of the Berghof was sixty feet long and fifty feet wide, "so large that people seemed to be lost in it." Heavy wooden furniture, typical of the Alps, stood in front of a huge jade green fireplace. Gobelin tapestries and Italian paintings decorated the walls. In fact, there were so many paintings from so many different schools that "the room resembled a picture gallery in an eccentric museum."

What few saw or ever were permitted to visit was Eagle's Nest, a fortress situated several thousand feet higher. Hitler himself is said to have gone there only three times, complaining that it was too high, that the air was too thin and that it was hard for him to breathe. Nevertheless, Eagle's Nest was a masterpiece of engineering. Built over a three-year period and designed to withstand bombardments and artillery fire, Eagle's Nest could be reached only by an elevator that had been cut into the solid rock of the mountain.

Now, with his column paused at the base of the mountain, de Nonancourt stared toward the peak, lost in thought as he tried to imagine the horrors that had been masterminded from that bucolic setting. Suddenly, his thoughts were interrupted by a shout from his commanding officer.

"You, de Nonancourt, you're from Champagne, right?"

Before Bernard could reply, the officer went on, "So you must know something about wine. Get down here right now and come with me."

Bernard jumped from his tank and followed the officer to his jeep, where a small group of other soldiers had gathered. "Up there," said the officer, pointing toward Eagle's Nest at the top of the Obersalzburg mountain, "is a cave, a wine cellar really. That's where Hitler put the wine he stole from France. We are going to get it back, and you are in charge, de Nonancourt."

Bernard was stunned. He knew the Germans had hauled away millions of bottles of wine from his country; he had even seen some of it stolen from the village where he once worked, but a wine cellar on top of a mountain seemed incredible. To be the one who would open it was almost overwhelming.

Bernard knew his a.s.signment would not be easy. The 8,000-foot-high mountain was steep and some of its slopes had been planted with land mines. He wondered if the cave itself was b.o.o.by-trapped.

As Bernard tried to picture how he would get up there and what he would find inside, a sense of exhilaration swept over him. Ever since 1940, when forces of the Third Reich swept into France and occupied the country, Bernard, like many other young Frenchmen, had hoped the war would last long enough for him to partic.i.p.ate in the liberation and to be a part of history. This, he realized, was his chance, for Hitler's cave was much more than a wine cellar; it was a symbol of cruelty and greed, of n.a.z.i Germany's hunger for wealth and riches.

How a young man from Champagne got to Berchtesgaden and became one of the few people ever to set eyes on the treasures. .h.i.tler had ama.s.sed for himself is one of the most fascinating stories of the war.

And one we heard almost by accident.

It began with a guessing game.

We were in the Loire Valley interviewing Vouvray's Gaston Huet for an article about plans by the government to dig a tunnel through the area for the TGV, France's high-speed train. Winemakers, including Huet, who was then mayor of Vouvray, were up in arms. The train, they warned, would destroy their vineyards and ruin their wines, which were stored in the surrounding limestone caves.

"There are hundreds of thousands of bottles in those caves," said Huet, who was leading the protest. "Noise and vibrations from the train could spell disaster."

Suddenly, Huet excused himself and disappeared from the room. He returned with a bottle and three gla.s.ses. "This is one of the reasons I am against the train," he said, holding the unlabeled bottle out to us. It was streaked with cobwebs and covered with dust. Without saying another word, Huet pulled the cork and began to pour. The wine was brilliant gold in color. We looked at each other in antic.i.p.ation, then at Huet. A faint smile had crossed his face.

"Go on, try it," he said.

The first sip left no doubt in our minds that we were tasting something extraordinary. The wine was dazzling. It was lusciously sweet, yet so fresh and alive one might have thought it had been made yesterday, and we told him so.

"So what year do you think it is?" asked Huet.

We guessed 1976, a great year for Loire Valley wines, but Huet only shook his head and urged us to try again. 1969? Same reaction. 1959? Wrong again.

Huet, looking more amused by the minute, was clearly enjoying himself. We decided to give it one more shot. "How about 1953?" We tried to make it sound more like a statement than a question, but Huet was not fooled. The smile on his face growing wider as he let us puzzle over what we were tasting a few seconds longer.

"1947," he finally said. "It is probably the greatest wine I ever made." He said it with affection and pride, almost as if he were describing a favorite child.

As we swirled the wine, a heavenly bouquet of honey and apricots soared from our gla.s.ses. We asked Huet, then in his eighties, if he had ever tasted anything better. Although our question was almost rhetorical, Huet paused and turned serious.

"Only once," he replied. "It was when I was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II." And he went on to tell us one of the most amazing stories we have ever heard, a story about courage, loneliness, despair and, in the end, how a tiny bit of wine helped Huet and his fellow POWs survive five years of imprisonment. "I don't even remember exactly what it was I drank," said Huet. "It was no more than a thimbleful, but it was the only wine we had in five years, and it was glorious."

Glorious for him, intriguing for us. Until we heard Huet's story, we had never thought about "wine and war." We soon learned that the connection goes back a long way. In the sixth century B.C., Cyrus the Great of Persia ordered his troops to drink wine as an antidote to infection and illness. Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte were believers too. Napoleon even hauled wagonloads of champagne on his campaigns, most of the time anyway. The reason he lost the battle of Waterloo, some say, was that he did not have time to pick up any champagne and had to fight on Belgian beer alone.

Perhaps with that in mind, French soldiers in World War I were issued cases of champagne to keep close beside them in the trenches to keep their morale up. When World War II broke out, the French government sent utensils and recipes for making hot wine to the front. As one official explained, "A ration of hot wine is not expensive, and very helpful in preventing epidemics and comforting soldiers."

But wine's apogee as a military tactic may have occurred three hundred years earlier when it was used to save Germany's beautiful walled city of Rothenburg from destruction during the Thirty Years' War. According to wine authority Herbert M. Baus, "Rothenburg was at the mercy of the victorious Tilly's 30,000 men when that field marshal, in a moment of mercy, promised to spare the city if one of its aldermen could empty a three-and-half-liter goblet of wine in one draught. Burgermeister Nusch proved equal to the challenge, and the site of his epic feat is called to this day Freudengsslein, or Lane of Joy."

For us, the joy of wine has been as much in the sharing of it as in the drinking. One of the greatest wines we have ever tasted was a 1905 Grand Vin de Chteau Latour. It was exquisite, absolutely mind-boggling, but what made the experience even more special was being able to share it with Gertrude de Gallaix, a dear friend who lived in Paris during World War II and who was born in the same year that the wine was made.

There also was a bottle of rose we once drank that, in all honesty, was not much of a wine, but sharing it with friends on a warm summer's day made that day special and the wine as unforgettable, in a way, as the 1905 Latour.

Andre Simon, the noted French wine authority, described wine as "a good counselor, a true friend, who neither bores nor irritates us: it does not send us to sleep, nor does it keep us awake . . . it is always ready to cheer, to help, but not to bully us."

Yet the fascinating wines we tasted did "bully us" at times into asking questions. Gaston Huet's story had piqued our interest and aroused our curiosity. Over the next few years, we met other winemakers who told us their war stories, some of them funny and some that touched the heart. As we listened, we gradually realized that these stories, like a good bottle of wine, were things we wanted to share. They were stories that deserved to be told and remembered-in a book.

Collecting the stories was not always easy. Some people were afraid and refused to talk about a time tainted by those who collaborated with the enemy and tried to make money from the war. "It's much too sensitive," said one person who declined to be interviewed. "Better to let the dead rest in peace and the living live in peace."

Many papers dealing with collaborators were sealed under a French law aimed at protecting the personal privacy of individuals. Other papers were destroyed at the end of the war on orders from the German high command.

Other problems we encountered included faded memories and the fact that many people have pa.s.sed away. On several occasions, we received a note or call saying the person we were scheduled to interview had just died.

Although it was, literally, a race against time, sometimes we had to go slowly. People from the generation that had fought in the war were not always ready to talk about it. Their first reaction was "Oh my, that was such a long time ago. I'm not sure . . ." and then their voice would drift off and silence would settle in. But then, suddenly, he or she might say, "But there is one thing I remember . . ." and then we would find ourselves listening to a wonderful story.

Younger people we approached were sometimes hesitant too. "Please, I was only a child," they would say, "I don't remember anything." But often they did, and their stories were among the most revealing, giving us very clear snapshots of a complicated era.

For instance, Jean-Michel Cazes, owner of Chteau Lynch-Bages and Chteau Pichon-Baron in Bordeaux, showed us that the barometer of the war was on the playground as well as on the battleground. In the fall of 1940, when he and his friends returned to school, Cazes, who was then eight, recalled how they all wanted to play at being Germans. "The Germans seemed so strong and clever that we all wanted to be them in our games," he said. Two years later, with the face of France already altered by the German occupation, the interests of the children had changed too. "By then," said Cazes, "we all wanted to be the Maquis, the underground, fighting the Germans. It was much more romantic." As more time pa.s.sed and the Germans tightened their grip on Bordeaux, romance gave way to realism. "We used to peek out at the Germans marching and then they seemed not just strong but also very frightening." When the fortunes of the Germans began to change in the last years of the war, so too did games on the playgrounds. "We all wanted to be Americans then," said Cazes. By the end of the war, the change of heart was complete; the children in the playgrounds of France were playing at cowboys and Indians.

Many of the people we interviewed belonged to families that had been making wine for generations. Not only did they know what wine was about but they also knew what war was about. They had lived through it, some more than once, and they were acutely conscious of what it takes to survive. For the Rothschilds of Chteau Lafite-Rothschild in Bordeaux, it meant fleeing the country before the Germans took over their property. For Henri Jayer of Vosne-Romanee in Burgundy, it meant trading his wine for food so his family would have enough to eat. For Prince Philippe Poniatowski of Vouvray, it meant burying his best wines in his yard so that he would have something to restart business with after the war.

Survival, however, did not always require desperate measures; sometimes people just got lucky. For Rene Couly of Chinon, it was a flat tire that saved him. "My father had just been called up by the army and was made a truck driver, since he had lots of experience driving our trucks," his son told us. "He was in his truck following his company to the front when he had a flat tire. While he stopped to fix it, the rest of the troops continued on and marched right into an ambush. Every single person was taken prisoner." Everyone, that is, except Couly. "After changing the tire, my father turned around and went home to his vineyard."

Although most of the information we gathered came from interviews, occasionally it was the wine itself that did the "talking." A 1940 La Tche we tasted with Robert Drouhin, one of Burgundy's most respected winemakers and negociants, spoke volumes about the wartime difficulties winemakers had to overcome in order to make good wine. Most Burgundies that year were decimated by rot and mildew because the Germans had requisitioned all metals including copper for their industrial war machine. Without copper, winemakers had no copper sulfate for treating their vines. The La Tche from the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, however, was one of the survivors and a fitting climax to a wonderful dinner with Drouhin. Of the wine, our notes said: "Good color, spicy bouquet, fading a little but still elegant and charming."

Another bottle we shared with Drouhin on another occasion told an entirely different story. It was a white 1940 Clos des Mouches, extremely rare and one of the first white Clos des Mouches Robert's father ever made. Alas, the wine was undrinkable. It was dull brown and totally maderized. "No good," said Madame Franoise Drouhin, frowning slightly and putting her gla.s.s down. Her husband's reaction was a little different. "Interesting," he said. And he was right. We could literally sense, almost taste, the problems the Drouhins faced when they made the wine. There was a hint of fungus and a touch of death on the nose.

And there was something else we noticed. The bottle it came in was pale blue-green instead of the usual brownish green, a color Burgundians describe as feuilles mortes, or dead leaves. "This wine was probably bottled in 1942," said Drouhin, "when everyone had to recycle their bottles or get them wherever they could, which meant bottles were made with any sort of gla.s.s composition that could be had."

But wherever we went and whomever we talked to, the point that was always stressed-the one we could never ignore-was how important wine is to France. It is not just a beverage or commercial product to be poured from a bottle. It is much more than that. Like the flag, the Tricolore, it goes to the country's heart and soul. "Wine makes us proud of our past," said one official. "It gives us courage and hope." How else to explain why vignerons in Champagne rushed into their vineyards to harvest the 1915 vintage even as artillery sh.e.l.ls were falling all around? Or why King Louis XI in his first act after conquering Burgundy in 1477 confiscated the entire vintage of Volnay for himself? Or why a priest in a small village in Champagne not long ago admonished his parish to remember, "Our champagne is not just about making money. It is about bringing joy to people."

And perhaps something spiritual. "Our wines evolve slowly and n.o.bly, carrying with them hopes for a prolonged life," explained one winegrower. "We know our land was here before we came and that it will be here long after we are gone. With our wine, we have survived wars, the Revolution and phylloxera. Each harvest renews promises made in the spring. We live with the continuing cycle. This gives us a taste of eternity."

Recently the French government commissioned a study of what makes the French "French," or, as one scholar put it, "to a.s.sess what makes up French historical memory and ident.i.ty." It was a vast work, in seven volumes. Part of it was a survey in which people were asked to define the qualities that made them French. Places one through three were what you might expect: being born in France, defending liberty and speaking French. But right behind them in fourth place was wine, specifically knowing and appreciating "good" wine. This came as no surprise to the survey's authors, who concluded, "Wine is part of our history; it's what defines us."

In 1932, a year before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Hubert de Mirepoix, president of the French Winegrowers a.s.sociation, gave a speech at the organization's annual convention in which he described how wine "contributed to the French race by giving them wit, gaiety and good taste, qualities which set it profoundly apart from people who drink a lot of beer."

Although this is a book about wine and war, it is not a wine book, not really, nor is it a book just about war. It is about people, people who indeed exude wit, gaiety and good taste, and whose love of the grape and devotion to a way of life helped them survive and triumph over one of the darkest and most difficult chapters in French history.

ONE.

To Love the Vines.

IT WAS LATE AUGUST 1939, AND FRENCH winemakers were fretting about the harvest. Two months earlier, the outlook had been bright. The weather had been good and there was the promise of an excellent vintage. Then the weather changed. For six straight weeks it rained, and temperatures plummeted.

So did the mood of winegrowers attending the International Congress of the Vine and Wine in the resort of Bad Kreuznach, Germany. The weather was all they could think about-that is, until the next speaker was announced. He was Walter Darre, the Minister of Food Supply and Agriculture for the Third Reich. Winegrowers had been jolted when they first walked into the convention hall and discovered a large portrait of Darre's boss, Adolf Hitler, dominating the room. Like the rest of the world, they had watched with growing alarm as. .h.i.tler annexed Austria, carved up Czechoslovakia and signed a military agreement with Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini. Many, fearful that full-scale war was just one step away, felt sure Darre would have something to say about the latest events.

But when the Reichsminister took the podium, he did not speak about the war. He did not even talk about wine. Instead, he called for the Congress delegates to go beyond the concerns of wine and winemaking and work instead to "advance the mutual understanding of peaceful peoples." Those in the audience were thoroughly confused.

What they did not know was that at almost the same moment Hitler himself was giving a very different kind of speech-this one to his high command-in another German resort, Berchtesgaden, the favored vacation spot of the n.a.z.i leaders.h.i.+p. The Fhrer was telling his generals what was coming next and exhorting them to remember, "Our opponents are little worms. . . . What matters in beginning and waging war is not righteousness but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Proceed brutally."

Within a week, his forces invaded Poland. The date was September 1, 1939. French winegrowers at the conference were promptly summoned home. Two days later, France, along with Britain, Australia and New Zealand, declared war on Germany.

For the second time in little more than a generation, French winegrowers faced the agonizing prospect of trying to get their harvest in before vineyards were turned into battlefields. As in 1914, the government mounted an extraordinary campaign to help. Winegrowers were granted delays in being called to active duty, military labor detachments were sent to the vineyards and farm horses of small growers were not to be requisitioned until the harvest was completed.

Memories of that earlier war, "the war to end all wars," still haunted them-the brutality, the hards.h.i.+ps and especially the staggering loss of life. Out of a population of 40 million, nearly a million and a half young men were killed, men who would have entered their most productive years had they survived. Another million lost limbs or were so badly wounded that they could no longer work.

It was a bloodletting that left almost no family in France untouched: not the Drouhins of Burgundy, the Miailhes of Bordeaux, the de Nonancourts of Champagne, the Hugels of Alsace, nor the Huets of the Loire Valley.

Gaston Huet's father returned home an invalid, his lungs permanently scarred after his army unit was attacked with mustard gas.

Bernard de Nonancourt's father also suffered the ravages of trench warfare and died of wounds soon after the war.

The mother of Jean Miailhe lost her entire family when German troops attacked their village in northern France.

The Hugel family, which had lost its French heritage and nationality when Alsace was annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 187071, sent their son away so that he could escape being drafted into the German army.

Maurice Drouhin, a veteran of trench warfare, escaped physical injury but not the nightmares which haunted him for years afterward.

Like nearly everyone else in France, these winemaking families watched with trepidation as the specter of another war approached. Although France had been the winner earlier, it had paid a terrible price. Could it afford another such victory? Many in France doubted it, especially Maurice Drouhin, who had witnessed the horrors of war close up.

Thoughts of his family and vineyard were all that comforted him as he huddled with his men in the muddy blood-soaked trenches of northern France, peering at the enemy across a strip of no-man's-land. Although the winter of 1915 still had that part of the country in its grip, Maurice knew that back home in Burgundy, the vines already would be stirring and workers would be busy pruning. If he closed his eyes, he could almost picture it, the men with their secateurs working their way slowly down the long rows of vines; and he could almost hear the church bells that called them to work each day.

Those bells were the first sounds Maurice heard each morning when he awoke in his home in Beaune. For him, they were the background music to life in the vineyards. They rolled across the villages and wheat fields, they sent children racing to school and mothers scurrying to markets for the freshest produce of the day. They heralded lunchtime, dinnertime, and called people to wors.h.i.+p, and to celebrate. But as World War I ground on, they were calling more and more people to mourn.