Wine And War: The French, The Nazis And The Battle For France's Greatest Treasure Part 13

Although neither 1939 nor 1937 was a great year (indeed 1939 was to prove itself awful), these wines can hardly be called "duds." They came from some of the greatest estates of Bordeaux. At the time Eschenauer sold them, they const.i.tuted a more than satisfactory drink.

Eschenauer's testimony was even less consistent and convincing when he was questioned about a company he set up, the Societe des Grands Vins Franais. Its purpose, he said, was to buy property for Bmers. In the spring of 1941, the company purchased Chteaux Lestage and Bel-Air, two Jewish-owned wine estates that had been seized and "Aryanized" by the Vichy government.

When he was first asked why he bought the chteaux, Eschenauer testified that it was because he wanted to "avoid pressure" from Bmers, who was trying to take over his business; if Bmers got those chteaux, maybe he would not try to take Maison Eschenauer too.

Under subsequent questioning, however, Eschenauer said the real reason he had bought the two properties was that he was "trying to save them" for their rightful Jewish owners. "I knew Germany would lose the war and that any promise I made to Bmers during the war would be null and void afterward."

The court judges were skeptical. When they asked Eschenauer for doc.u.ments to back up his testimony, Uncle Louis said there were none, that everything had been handled on a verbal basis. "Bmers had complete confidence in me," he said. Then he added, "The truth is, I actually had very little involvement in the company; everything was handled by my bookkeeper." The bookkeeper claimed this was false.

Florence Mothe said she was among those stunned by Eschenauer's testimony. "Why would a man who had been denied nothing in life, from the smallest thing to the greatest luxury, behave in such a way? Turn on those who worked with him? That is what I cannot understand."

From the moment the trial began, it had been watched with growing anxiety throughout Bordeaux. Other negociants who had sold wine to Germany knew it could easily have been any of them on the stand. Some, in fact, had already been fined and seen their goods confiscated. Others had actively competed for Bmers's attention and business by inviting him to parties and trying to demonstrate their interest in German music and literature. According to notes kept by Bmers's secretary, the weinfhrer found all of this "ridiculous." Now the Chartrons were worried, because soliciting business from the enemy was grounds for charging a firm or individual with economic collaboration.

Consequently, although many in the Bordeaux wine trade had resented and were jealous of Eschenauer's business connections during the war, most now rallied to his defense. Some wrote letters describing him as a "patriot" and a "man of integrity." One supporter claimed Eschenauer helped the Resistance by loaning it trucks to haul food and weapons. Another said he had helped Jews escape from the Gestapo. Even Baron Philippe de Rothschild of Chteau Mouton-Rothschild wrote a letter in his behalf.

As his three-day trial neared its end, Eschenauer denied any wrongdoing and reiterated that he was not a collaborator. He had joined Groupe Collaboration, he said, "just to please a friend," adding that he never really had anything to do with the group itself. He admitted, however, that he had made a donation to the organization.

His most important service, he said, was helping save Bordeaux from destruction. "Thanks to my good relations with Ernst Khnemann and other German officers, I was able to persuade them, after many long and intense negotiations, not to carry out their plans for destroying the port and other parts of the city."

Uncle Louis's trial ended on Armistice Day, the day marking victory over Germany in World War I. It was the first Armistice Day to be celebrated after the war. Once again it had been declared a national holiday and large celebrations were planned. No newspapers would be published. That was the best part as far as the court was concerned. Publicity would be minimal when the verdict was announced.

The panel of judges retired to consider its verdict at 1:15 in the morning. By 3 A.M., they were back in the courtroom.

The verdict: guilty on all charges.

The judges dismissed Eschenauer's claim that he tried to resist demands for wine by Heinz Bmers. "He willingly agreed to furnish Bmers with what he wanted and at no point did he ever refuse." The court also dismissed Eschenauer's testimony that his company, the Societe des Grands Vins Franais, had purchased two "Aryanized" Jewish-owned chteaux in order to save them for their rightful Jewish owners. "The company," the court said, "was created for only one purpose, to do business with the enemy." (Bmers had made no secret of the fact that he wanted to own a wine property in Bordeaux again after losing Chteau Smith-Haut-Lafitte in World War I. Several years after World War II, he bought Chteau du Grand Mouys, which his firm still owns.) Uncle Louis was sentenced to two years in prison and fined more than 62 million francs for illegal profiteering. He admitted doing 957 million francs' worth of business during the war, but it was the way he did that business that disturbed authorities most. His courting of German officials at his restaurant and at the racetrack and his flaunting of those relations.h.i.+ps made him a natural target. As one Bordelais who knew him said, "Louis just went too far."

His property was confiscated and he was forbidden from doing business in Bordeaux. He also lost all rights as a French citizen.

As Uncle Louis was led away, he broke down in tears. "After 1918, they gave me a medal for selling wines to the Germans, now they fling me in prison for doing the same thing," he sobbed. "If Mama were to see me now!"

De Gaulle intended that the purge process would be swift, that after the more notorious collaborators had been punished, the process of healing, restoring order and unifying the country could begin. He was especially eager to see this happen in Bordeaux, a region whose political support he considered important and whose economic resources-its wine and its port-were vital for the recovery of the nation. To that end, his government, in 1951, pa.s.sed an amnesty law which allowed many businessmen who had been found guilty of excess profiteering to return to their offices.

Louis Eschenauer was amnestied in 1952. He spent the remainder of his days in his chteau at Camponac in Pessac, just outside Bordeaux.

Before Uncle Louis died, Heinz Bmers, Jr., son of Bordeaux's weinfhrer, came to Bordeaux to learn more about the wine business. Uncle Louis was there to welcome him and take him to the races.

"There is something I wish to tell you," he said, taking Heinz by the arm. "I want you to know that I have always been a friend of your father. I was his friend before the war and I was his friend during the war. And I am still his friend today."

ELEVEN.

I Came Home Not Young Anymore IT WAS LATE MORNING WHEN A BENT, elderly-looking man, a handmade knapsack on his back, came trudging through the mud and slush of a warm February.

Gaston Huet was on his way home.

After five years as a prisoner of war, Huet and the men of Oflag IV D finally had been released. It happened without warning. They had been awakened early in the morning by sounds they had never heard before and a sight they could never have imagined. Charging straight for the camp were sword-wielding Cossacks on horseback, yelling at the top of their lungs. Huet and the other POWs watched in astonishment as the riders galloped through the gates and overran the guardhouses, sending the frightened Germans fleeing. Was it freedom, Huet wondered, or more captivity with different masters?

Through the confusion, one of the Cossack leaders finally made himself understood. "Go," he told the Frenchmen. "Take just what you can carry."

For Huet, it would not be much. There were letters from home, letters that helped sustain him through some of the worst moments of his captivity. There was also the piece of the French flag he had torn off in Calais just before he was taken prisoner in 1940. He had looked at it so many times, wondering if there would ever be a France again. The last thing Huet put in his bag was a copy of the program from the wine celebration he had organized, an affair that had done as much as anything to make his life as a POW bearable.

Huet took one last look around the camp. He stared at the barracks where he had lived, then at the guardhouses; the machine guns were still in place. So was the barbed wire which ringed the camp. Huet also looked at the Tombe d'Adolph, the mock grave of Hitler which the prisoners had built. Life in Oflag IV D had been a nightmare, the paralyzing cold of winter, the awful heat of summer and especially the lack of food. He s.h.i.+vered when he recalled the bitter January days when prisoners tried to catch rats for dinner. Yet some incredible friends.h.i.+ps had been forged during those years.

He thought about those friends.h.i.+ps as he proceeded down Hitlerstra.s.se, the name given to the dirt path which cut through the middle of the camp and led to the front gate.

Huet pa.s.sed through the gate and started walking west, toward France and home.

He was not alone. The roads were full of frail sick men, all looking far older than their years. At times, the men tried to help and encourage each other as the mud sucked at their worn-out shoes and boots. They were so weak after their years of captivity that each step was painful. All that kept them going were thoughts of home. What would they say to their families? Would their friends recognize them? What had happened in the five years they had been gone?

For more than a hundred kilometers, Huet kept going, stumbling over roads that had been torn up by tanks and pockmarked by repeated bombing. The war was not quite over; Germany had not yet surrendered. At times, Huet and the other POWs had to throw themselves onto the wet and cold ground for protection as fighter planes and bombers flew overhead.

As they approached the Franco-German border, they met Allied troops coming toward them. The troops rushed to help them. "This way, this way," the troops said, escorting the POWs to trains bound for France.

It was late February when Huet finally arrived back in Vouvray. He returned to a welcome that needed no words. "We just fell into each other's arms, my wife and I," he remembered. "We were laughing and crying at the same time. So many emotions."

And then he saw his daughter. The baby he had last seen on her first birthday was now a little girl, nearly seven years old, and shy behind her mother's skirts. She peeked out at the man she knew only from his letters and her mother's stories and asked if he wanted to play. The question made him weep. "She was so beautiful, I could hardly believe it," Huet said.

It would be some time before he was ready to play, however. Huet had lost more than one-third of his body weight. Before being captured, he weighed nearly 160 pounds. When he was freed, he weighed less than 100.

Before he fell asleep that first night at home, he had one last question. "And the vines? How are the vines?"

A few days later, Huet discovered the answer for himself and nearly wept again. Five years of war and neglect had taken their toll. No pruning had been done and the vines were gangly, their branches hanging down every which way. Gone were the tidy rows that once had been so carefully staked and tied neatly to the lines of wire. And weeds were everywhere, even though it was only March. Plowing had been impossible because the Germans had requisitioned the horses. Huet could clearly see what the lack of fertilizer and copper sulfate had meant as he looked at the number of sick and aged vines that needed replacing.

It was a plight facing nearly every winegrower, and the problems extended to their cellars as well. Wines that had lain in wooden casks for five years desperately needed bottling, but that was impossible because there was a bottle shortage. For many wines, it was already too late. They had dried out, lost their fruit and were undrinkable. The casks in which they had been aging were ruined as well. Some had become moldy from overuse, while others were damaged when overzealous Vichy inspectors poured oil into them to prevent vignerons from withholding their industrial alcohol quota.

Just when it seemed as if the picture could not be worse, Mother Nature conspired against winegrowers. On May 1, the early warm spring vanished as France was gripped by a deep freeze. Temperatures dropped below zero. Vines with young shoots already sprouting were frozen solid. One old winemaker in Bordeaux said he had never seen such a hard frost so late in the spring. Many growers lost their entire crop.

It was not much different in other wine regions. In Burgundy, however, the worst was yet to come. Maurice Drouhin had been heartened when, after the frost, temperatures soared again and his vines showed new signs of life and began to flower.

Now, as he stared at the sky with his son Robert, dark clouds advanced ominously from the northeast. It was 5 P.M., June 21. On what should have been the longest day of the year, the whole of Burgundy was suddenly plunged into darkness, almost as if night had fallen. The wind rose and the house began to shake. Then it began to hail. b.a.l.l.s of ice shredded vineyards throughout the Cte de Beaune. Ten of the main villages, from Puligny to Corton, were ravaged. Maurice could only shake his head. Like everyone else, he wondered if there would be enough grapes to make any wine at all.

The following morning, he and Robert went out to survey the damage. Leaves of his vines looked like they had been sliced with a knife. Flowers looked as if they had been trampled into the ground by a stampede. Maurice stopped to talk to other vignerons, but there was little to say. It was the same everywhere. Everyone realized they would be lucky if they could salvage even 5 percent of their crop.

Maurice decided it was time to do something he had been putting off until the German surrender had been signed and he was positive the war was over. "Grab a broom," he told Robert. "We're going to get rid of a few cobwebs."

Together, they went down to the cave and began brus.h.i.+ng away the webs and grime that had acc.u.mulated on the wall Maurice had built five years earlier. "Those little spiders of yours did a good job," he said to Robert. Then they began knocking down the wall. The wines that had been hidden behind appeared to be in perfect shape, including a complete stock from the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti from 1929 to 1938.

Maurice took one of the bottles up for dinner that night and told Pauline it was a celebration. With these wines, he said, we'll be able to pay our bills and get business going again.

It was a strategy many others were adopting as they recovered wines they had hidden from the Germans. Gaston Huet retrieved his wines from a cave along the Loire River. The weeds and brush he had planted now completely concealed the opening, but he had no trouble finding it.

His brother-in-law Andre Foreau, another Vouvray winemaker, dug up his garden to unearth the bottles he had buried. So did a neighbor, Prince Philippe Poniatowski. But Poniatowski was worried about what the time underground may have done to his wine, so he called in some wine experts to join him in a tasting. The verdict was unanimous: all the wines were in outstanding condition, even the 1875.

In Champagne, Marie-Louise de Nonancourt took her son Bernard with her when she broke down her wall at Laurent-Perrier. There was one casualty. Her statue of the Virgin Mary, which she had cemented into the wall to guard the hidden stock, shattered as sledgehammers. .h.i.t the bricks. Marie-Louise, however, saw it as a sign of good luck, saying the Virgin had done her job and now it was up to the de Nonancourts.

In June 1945, the Marquis d'Angerville of Volnay in Burgundy was surprised to receive a letter from one J. R. Swan of New York City. The letter read, "I am writing you to ask if you are still in possession of 10 cases of Volnay Champans '34 and 10 cases of Meursault Santenots '34 purchased from you for me and left in your care. It would be a great deal to expect that they had not been taken by the Germans but there is always the chance that I have been fortunate."

The wine Swan had ordered represented just a few of the many bottles that had spent the war hidden and untouched behind a wall in d'Angerville's cellar. In a letter to Swan, the marquis informed him that the wine was still there and would be s.h.i.+pped to him immediately.

But it was a task the marquis approached with regret. His 1934 Volnay Champans was one of the best wines he had ever made and he hated parting with it. 1934 had been an outstanding vintage, certainly the best of the decade, and it had produced wines that were rich, velvety and harmonious. His '34 Volnay Champans was no exception. It was the wine he and his family drank to celebrate the end of the war, and if there had been any way he could have held on to some of it, he would have done so.

D'Angerville realized, however, there was no alternative. Unless he let it go, there would be no way to start business again. So he packed it up.

30,000,000 BOTTLES OF CHAMPAGNE THAT GERMANS MISSED ARE AWAITING EXPORT Paris, Sept. 13 (UP) - More than 30,000,000 bottles of champagne are in French cellars waiting to be exported to the United States, because the Germans were afraid to go into the underground caverns to remove them. Leon Douarche, former director of the International Wine Office, said today that the Germans carried away only a small percentage of this year's production of wine and champagne, which he estimated at 3,700,000,000 liters, compared to the yearly average figure of 5,500,000,00.

-The New York Times, Sept. 14, 1944 In July 1944, Otto Klaebisch, the weinfhrer of Champagne, placed a large order for champagne for the German military with the CIVC. Three weeks later he abruptly canceled it and fled back to Germany.

With Patton's Third Army rapidly advancing toward Champagne, the Germans had to leave quickly, so quickly, in fact, that they did not even have time to set off all the explosives they had planted under bridges. Nor did they destroy Champagne's vast cellars as Himmler had threatened to do.

Nevertheless, the German occupation had left companies and personal lives in tatters. There were millions of francs' worth of unpaid bills for champagne the n.a.z.is had s.h.i.+pped to Germany. Champagne houses, notably Mot & Chandon, were in disarray after their executives had been imprisoned and the houses themselves had been placed under direct German control.

The Champenois, therefore, were relieved when they heard that Robert-Jean de Voge, who had headed both Mot and the CIVC, was still alive after a year and a half in a slave-labor camp. They were horrified, however, when they saw his condition.

De Voge was not supposed to have survived. The n.a.z.is had put the letters NN against his name-Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog)-which meant work him to death and dump him into an unmarked grave. Just after he arrived at the camp, a s.a.d.i.s.tic guard told him, "You know what they say about Ziegenhain, don't you? Those who come to Ziegenhain come here to die."

De Voge almost did.

One morning he awoke to discover that an infection in the little finger of his right hand had become much worse. As he examined it more closely, he realized that gangrene had set in. When he asked for a doctor, the authorities ignored him. De Voge knew he would die unless he did what was necessary himself. He found a piece of gla.s.s and sharpened it as best he could. Then he began to cut. With no anesthetic, the pain was unbearable but de Voge continued to cut until he had removed his entire finger. Using the rags of his concentration camp clothes, he finally stopped the bleeding. The crude operation saved his life, but it was almost for naught.

When his camp was liberated, de Voge began walking. He had gone only a few kilometers before he collapsed. As he lay unconscious along the road, a British officer pa.s.sed by and stopped. He was a man whom de Voge had once worked with in Champagne. The Englishman jumped out of his jeep and picked up de Voge; then he notified de Voge's family that he was bringing him home.

For de Voge's five children, it was an exciting moment. They had no idea of their father's condition and had decorated the living room with signs of "Welcome Home, Papa."

When de Voge arrived, all the joy vanished. No one recognized the frail, sticklike figure who could no longer stand on his own. He bore no resemblance to the elegant, dynamic man who had run the Mot & Chandon champagne house and who had faced down Otto Klaebisch.

Now he hung between the shoulders of the British officer and his brother-in-law. His greeting was so faint the children were not even sure he had spoken. Their mother began to cry as she ushered the men into the bedroom to help put her husband to bed. For days, there was doubt he would recover.

De Voge's a.s.sistant, Claude Fourmon, who was arrested with him in Klaebisch's office, arrived back in Champagne in as bad a condition. Fourmon had been sent to Bergen-Belsen, where each day was a test of survival. He would fix a date to live and then, when that date pa.s.sed, he would pick another one. "If I can just make it until January 13," he would tell himself, "then I can make it." When January 13 arrived, he picked another date.

Those dates stretched on through the winter of 194344. The cold was unbearable. "I sang," Fourmon said. "I sang against the cold. I sang hymns, children's songs, anything. Songs seemed to be the only thing that helped."

When he finally returned home, Fourmon, like de Voge, was barely alive. He had been tortured and was no longer the ebullient young man whom the Gestapo had arrested in Reims two years earlier. "I came back not young anymore," Fourmon said.

He was thirty years old.

May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing was crying. She and her family had just returned to Chteau Pichon-Longueville-Comtesse de Lalande. The Germans had left it only the day before, and the Miailhes, for the first time in four years, were getting a look inside.

"The Germans were brutes," she said. "They had dried their uniforms in front of the fires and sparks had flown everywhere. The beautiful boiseries were ruined and every pane of gla.s.s was broken. Even the marble fireplaces and doors were in pieces. Windows had been left open and rain poured in, ruining the parquet floors. Straw pallets on the floors where the soldiers slept were like mud.

"And the smell! It took us years to get the smell of the grease they used on their jackboots out of the chteau."

It was the same throughout Bordeaux as winemakers and winegrowers tried to erase the scars left by the occupation: swastikas carved into stonework, graffiti scribbled on walls, bullet holes.

Chteau Mouton-Rothschild had been occupied and damaged but not confiscated by the Third Reich. Like Chteau Lafite-Rothschild, the Vichy government had sequestrated Mouton to keep the Germans from declaring it a Jewish a.s.set and making it German property.

When Baron Philippe de Rothschild came back to Mouton, however, he was already bearing a burden of sorrow. He had fled France to join de Gaulle's Free French Forces in 1942, leaving behind a wife and tiny daughter. For most of the war, the two managed to survive, living first in the south of France and then in Paris. The baron's wife, the Comtesse Elizabeth de Chambure, was not Jewish, so she was confident the Germans would leave them alone.

But she was wrong. Just before Paris was liberated, the Gestapo arrived at her apartment. In front of the terrified eyes of her daughter Philippine, the comtesse was dragged out of her home and put on one of the last trains bound for the German death camps. She was killed in the gas chambers of Ravensbrck only a few days before the concentration camp was liberated.

Upon seeing his beloved Mouton, the baron became even more saddened. Although his wines were untouched, the chteau and grounds had been severely damaged by the n.a.z.is, who had transformed Mouton into a communications command center. There were even bullet holes in the walls of some of the rooms where the Germans had used paintings for target practice.

Baron Philippe was determined to eradicate all signs of the n.a.z.i presence. He discovered that some of the soldiers who had occupied his property were being held as prisoners in a nearby camp. "Who better to redo the chteau where there was devastation, everything to be cleaned, repaired, repainted," he later recalled in a memoir. When Baron Philippe asked authorities for permission to put the Germans to work, officials agreed.

For days, the POWs labored to repair the damage they had done, ripping down miles of communications cables they had strung around the chteau and demolis.h.i.+ng antiaircraft gun emplacements on the grounds. They also filled in the bullet holes.

But their work was far from finished. For years Baron Philippe had dreamed of creating a park around Mouton, along with a road that would link it directly with Mouton d'Armailhac, a neighboring wine estate he had acquired. The baron equipped the Germans with rakes, shovels and other tools and told them to get to work. Under a blazing sun, the prisoners began planting trees, flowers and shrubs, clearing land for a park and digging out a path for the road.

The project took months to complete but when it was finished, the baron p.r.o.nounced himself well satisfied.

"I can never look at the road," he said, "without thinking of it as the 'Route of Revenge.' "

French winegrowers were overwhelmed by the amount of work that lay before them and the amount of money it would cost. Money for repairs, money for new high-axle tractors and other equipment, money for fertilizer and copper sulfate, money for replacing vines. Where were they going to get it?

Fortunately, winegrowers had an understanding ear in the man in charge of the country's economic recovery program. He was Jean Monnet, who was soon to espouse the idea of a European Economic Community. Monnet had grown up among the vines of Cognac, where his family made the French brandy. He understood their problems and was acutely aware that one and a half million French families depended on wine for their livelihood.

But the new government, pressured by all sectors of the economy for a.s.sistance, could only go so far. Its main goal where wine was concerned was making sure there was an adequate supply. Thanks to Monnet's urging, the government finally agreed to provide money for replacing old and sick vines.

The new program was especially welcome in Alsace, where most vineyards had been planted with high-yielding low-quality hybrids following the 187071 Franco-Prussian War.

After World War I, the French government had ordered growers to rip out their hybrid vines and replace them with the traditional grape varieties of Alsace. Growers dragged their feet, complaining it was too expensive. The government did not force the issue.

When Alsace was annexed by Germany in 1940, new pressure was exerted, this time by Berlin. Get rid of the hybrids or else, the authorities warned. Still nothing happened.

One day in 1942, Alsatians awoke to the sound of sawing. Looking out their windows, they saw that their vineyards were full of Hitler Youth from Baden, Germany. The Third Reich had sent truckloads of the young people into Alsace armed with detailed maps of the vineyards and secateurs and saws. In one fell swoop, the hybrids, which had comprised 75 percent of the vineyards, were gone from Alsace.

In the opinion of most Alsatians, it was the one good thing the Germans did for Alsace. Now there was no choice but to replant.

Work, however, began slowly. Most of the vineyards were littered with unexploded mines and artillery sh.e.l.ls. There was also a labor shortage; nearly all of Alsace's young men had been drafted into the German army. Most were sent to the Russian front and a huge percentage had been killed. Those who survived were only now making their way home.

The waiting had been particularly difficult for the Hugels. Their eldest son, Georges, was now fighting in the French army; their second son, Johnny, still was in the German one.

Johnny returned home first. He had been in a German unit fighting near Lake Constance on the Austrian border when he spotted a column of French tanks approaching. Ducking into a nearby farmhouse, Johnny quickly shed his German uniform and traded it to a farmer for some old clothes. "Look after yourself," the farmer called as Johnny rushed out to greet the troops. He was back in Riquewihr a few days later.

One day after that, Georges returned as well.

That was when they discovered they had been in the same battle. Georges had been fighting at Lake Constance too.