Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure

by Donald Kladstrup

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  Wine and War

  T h e F r e n c h , t h e N a z i s ,

  a n d t h e B a t t l e

  f o r F r a n c e ’s G r e a t e s t T r e a s u r e

  Don and Petie Kladstrup

  With Dr. J. Kim Munholland, Historical Consultant

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Map: France in 1940

  Introduction

  1: To Love the Vines

  2: Nomads

  3: The Weinführers

  4: Hiding, Fibbing and Fobbing Off

  5: The Growling Stomach

  6: Wolves at the Door

  7: The Fête

  8: Saving the Treasure

  9: Eagle’s Nest

  10: The Collaborator

  11: I Came Home Not Young Anymore

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Authors

  Praise for Wine and War

  Copyright Page

  For Regan and Kwan-li,

  our daughters and inspiration.

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  List of Illustrations

  Using the methods of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, vineyard workers in St. Émilion bring in a harvest in the 1940s. “We had a way of living and making wine that was très 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, nobody knows, where they are going” (from the diary of Paul Valéry, 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 Nazis. 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 fête, 1943).

  GIs, fresh from the Normandy landings, take a short rest before pushing 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 Bömers, 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

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  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 Château Lafite-Rothschild and Château Mouton-Rothschild, Château Latour, Château d’Yquem and Romanée-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 pushing into Germany, their planes dropping thousands of tons of bombs on German industries, airfields and shipyards. 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 Nazi gods, 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 Nazis, like Göring, 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 Nazis shipped 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 assignment 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 booby-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 participate 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 Nazi 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 Hitler had amassed 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 glasses. “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 anticipation, 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 glasses. 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 Freudengässlein, 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 Château 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 rosé 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.

  André 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 passed away. On several occasions, we received a note or call saying the person we were scheduled to interview had just died.