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

by Donald Kladstrup

  In Alsace-Lorraine, an air of fatalism prevailed. “Here we go again,” people thought.

  The disputed provinces, on France’s eastern border with Germany, became French territory in the late seventeenth century. Between 1870 and 1945, however, they changed hands four times, passing from France to Germany, to France, to Germany and back to France.

  Among those who witnessed each change were the Hugels of Riquewihr, a family of winegrowers in Alsace since 1639. “We are specialists in war and wine,” said Johnny Hugel. “In 1939, we were just sitting down to celebrate our family’s three hundredth anniversary in the wine business when something happened: war was declared.” The party was canceled.

  The Hugel story, in many ways, is the story of Alsace. “My grandfather had to change his nationality four times,” Johnny’s brother André said. Grandfather Emile was born in 1869. He was born French, but two years later, in 1871, Alsace was taken over by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and he became German. The end of World War I in 1918 made him French again. In 1940, when Alsace was annexed, he was forced to become German. By 1950, when Emile died at the age of ninety-one, he was once again French.

  The constant swing between nationalities resulted in a kind of regional schizophrenia, a feeling of being part French, part German, but most of all Alsatian.

  Selling wine under such conditions was often a struggle; it meant suddenly adapting to different economic situations. As Papa Jean Hugel once wrote, “It is very easy on a map to change the line of the frontier overnight . . . but very often the new system was in direct contradiction to the previous one. The home market became the export market, out of reach through tariff restrictions and vice versa. Well-established connections were no longer available, and new markets had to be painstakingly won.”

  In the fall of 1939, it seemed inevitable that the whole agonizing process was about to repeat itself. With the declaration of war, the French government, fearing an attack, ordered that the city of Strasbourg, which sat just across the Rhine River from Germany, be evacuated. By the end of the year, with its 200,000 residents having fled, Strasboug was a ville morte, a dead city. But still nothing happened.

  The Hugels, however, were convinced it was only a matter of time before the Phony War became a real war. They had seen how appeasement had failed at Munich the year before, how Hitler had played Prime Ministers Daladier and Chamberlain for fools. When Hitler signed a friendship and nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939, the Hugels had little doubt war was just around the corner. They were proved right. “At that moment, we felt that the only way Germany could be stopped was if the United States joined the war,” Johnny Hugel said. But those hopes were dashed when President Roosevelt, in October, reaffirmed his country’s intent to remain neutral.

  Throughout Alsace, there was a feeling of impending doom, a sense of foreboding as threatening as the clouds that hung over the region during that cold gray November. The following month, as the holiday season drew near, the festive spirit that usually existed was nowhere to be seen. Most of Alsace’s villages, which looked as if they had popped out of a Hansel and Gretel storybook, remained dark. There were no twinkling lights, no music and laughter, none of the things that normally accompany the Christmas season.

  On Christmas Eve, the Hugels gathered together in Riquewihr as they always did, but it was a somber affair. In previous years, the house had always been decorated, everyone exchanged gifts and then sat down to a sumptuous dinner that included some wonderful wines. But not this year. No one was in the mood. Everyone feared that this would be their last Christmas as French citizens, and Grandpa Emile, an old man of seventy-five, did not want to die a German.

  “My mother cried the whole night,” André recalled. With two of her sons nearly old enough to be drafted into the German army and one of her brothers living in Germany, there was no consoling her.

  Gloom hung over another family as well.

  It had been a bad year for the Miailhes, a prominent winemaking family in Bordeaux. With properties that included Châteaux Pichon-Longueville, Siran, Coufran, Dauzac and Citran, the Miailhes had been one of the biggest wine producers in all of France.

  But not in 1939. “All the men had been called to military service and there was a desperate shortage of labor in the vineyards,” said May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing, who was fourteen when war was declared. Unlike the Hugels, she and her family were optimistic when the Munich agreement was signed. “We thought maybe everything would be all right, but we were wrong.”

  One of their first clues came in the summer of 1939 when they received an unexpected visit from some Jewish friends from Italy, friends who were also in the wine business.

  “They said the Italian government was chasing Jews away and that they didn’t know what was going to happen,” May-Eliane said. “There were two couples and three children, and we said why not stay here with us until we can figure out what to do?”

  Ever since Hitler had come to power in 1933, a steady stream of worried and frightened Jews had been pouring out of Germany and Eastern Europe, some seeking refuge in Britain and France while others emigrated to the United States, Argentina and Palestine. In November 1938, the flow quickened when ninety-one Jews were murdered in Germany during a night of looting and burning known as Kristallnacht.

  It was a tragedy May-Eliane’s aunt Renée Miailhe could understand. She herself had been a refugee after being orphaned in World War I. As a result, when their Jewish friends from Italy arrived, she never hesitated. “My aunt would turn no one away and the rest of the family agreed with her,” May-Eliane said. The two families were offered space in Château Palmer, of which the Miailhes were part owner. Still, the question remained: what to do next, and how long would the families be safe?

  They had been there less than a month when German forces invaded Poland, engaging in an orgy of slaughter that claimed more than 10,000 civilian lives, including 3,000 Polish Jews, some of whom were forced into synagogues and burned alive.

  Baron Robert de Rothschild, one of the owners of Château Lafite-Rothschild, had been watching the events with growing alarm ever since the early 1930s. As head of the consistory of the Great Synagogue in Paris, he was dismayed when others in the synagogue began complaining that too many Jewish refugees were flooding into France and that they should be turned away. “You sit there with your Legions of Honor and French passports,” he angrily told them, “but when the crunch comes, we will all be in the same sack!”

  In an effort to ease restrictions on immigrant Jews, Baron Robert contacted an old friend of his from World War I, Marshal Philippe Pétain, a war hero who was then serving as France’s ambassador to Spain. He asked him to use his influence to persuade the government to change its regulations. Pétain refused to help.

  “I think, by then, Pétain considered my grandfather to be an annoying Jew,” Eric de Rothschild later recalled.

  By the winter of 1939, Hitler’s march toward a Final Solution was well under way. What had started in the early 1930s with the expulsion of German Jews from their towns and villages continued with forced emigrations. Jews in Poland were expelled from their homes and forced to live in restricted areas, or, ghettos.

  The nightmare that was unfolding was not lost on the Miailhes or their Jewish friends. There were moments, however, when they tried to put aside their fears. One of the Italians was a first violinist with the Trieste Symphony Orchestra and the others were musicians as well. Every day, there was chamber music, with the Miailhes joining in. “I remember wonderful concerts of Schumann, Fauré and Bach,” said May-Eliane. “They would be held from five to seven o’clock every day, even when the weather became cold.” Because there was little heating, those concerts “made all of us feel warmer.”

  For French soldiers on the Maginot Line, the cold winter months did little to lift spirits. Four months had passed since France had declared war and still nothing had happened. The front remained quiet. To kill time, some soldiers
took up gardening and planted rosebushes along the Maginot Line. Others picked up binoculars and peered across the frontier, placing bets on German troops playing soccer.

  The inactivity of France’s “fighting men” did not go unnoticed by folks back home. One of the soldiers, a shopkeeper in civilian life, received an irate letter from his wife asking him to deal with some paperwork. “Since you don’t have anything to do, you write to the customer. I’ve got my hands full.”

  In Paris, meanwhile, restaurants were crowded and there were long queues in front of movie houses. “Paris must remain Paris,” explained Maurice Chevalier, “so that soldiers on leave can find a bit of Parisian charm despite all.”

  Most felt sure that if Germany did attack, France was fully prepared. “Confidence is a duty!” newspapers said. But that was not the only duty. The advertising department for a major store discovered another one in that fall of 1939: “Madame, it is your duty to be elegant!” it proclaimed.

  The government tried to present a confident face too. In March 1940, parliamentary debates over French military preparedness were punctuated by great declarations of patriotism and bravado, as well as rousing paeans to the virtues of le vin chaud du soldat, or hot mulled wine for soldiers. The biggest applause was reserved for Edouard Barthe, a government deputy and wine lobbyist, who called for wine canteens to be established at every major railway station where soldiers would gather. He also urged that 50 million extra hectoliters of wine be distributed as rations for soldiers on the front. “Wine is the good companion of soldiers,” he said. “It gives them courage.”

  But confidence was a thin veneer, and behind the scenes there were deep misgivings. In the government, there were many who felt that their leaders were spending more time playing politics than preparing for war. Some, in the face of Germany’s nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, felt France had targeted the wrong enemy. “Hitler is bad but Stalin is worse,” they said. Hardly anyone had a good thing to say about French foreign policy, which one historian said was torn “constantly between defeatist panic and aggressive overconfidence.”

  Prime Minister Daladier—cautious to a fault—strongly believed that a defensive strategy, symbolized by the Maginot Line, was the best way to protect France. He rejected the views of a tank commander named Charles de Gaulle, who argued that France’s hopes depended on the creation of a career army based on powerful and mobile armored forces. De Gaulle’s views, contained in two books he wrote in the early 1930s, were dismissed by Daladier and most of the military brass. Even when Daladier was replaced by the more aggressive-minded Paul Reynaud, de Gaulle’s strategy was still largely ignored.

  But others were paying attention. Young German military commanders had read de Gaulle’s books from cover to cover and were swiftly incorporating his offensive-oriented strategy into their own army.

  In some respects, the French government’s reluctance to do so was understandable. As historian Robert O. Paxton said, “Any Frenchman over thirty remembered the blind wastage of young men in 1914–18, which had made France a nation of old people and cripples. That stark fact was brought home daily by the sight of mutilated veterans in the street. It took on particular urgency in the middle 1930s with the advent of the ‘hollow years,’ the moment when, as demographers had predicted, the annual draft contingent dropped in half because so few boys had been born in 1915–19. One more bloodbath, and would there be a France at all?”

  Such fears sometimes resulted in measures that seemed almost paranoid. Shipments of wine to soldiers, for instance, were considered a state secret. Officials feared that if the Germans discovered the quantity of wine being sent to the front—soldiers were entitled to a liter of wine a day—the enemy could easily calculate the number and exact location of troops there.

  Of deeper concern was the continuing power struggle between Prime Minister Reynaud and the man he had replaced, Edouard Daladier, a struggle that infected the highest levels of government and induced a kind of paralysis in decision making. Both men had strong opinions on how the war should be conducted, Reynaud favoring a more aggressive approach while Daladier, who was now Foreign Minister, insisted on a defensive one. Unfortunately, both men also had mistresses who were equally opinionated and despised each other, and who were extremely adept at pillow talk when it came to telling their man how they thought the war should be fought. U.S. ambassador William Bullitt became so exasperated trying to deal with the French government that he fired off a telegram to President Roosevelt saying, “Poison injected in the horizontal position is particularly venomous.”

  It was now April 1940, seven months since the war had been declared. Winter had turned to spring and sidewalk cafés in Paris were filling up. It was beginning to feel like the summer of 1939 all over again, when, as Janet Flanner wrote, Paris experienced “a fit of prosperity, gaiety, and hospitality.”

  But it was all about to end.

  On May 9, Hitler told his general staff, “Gentlemen, you are about to witness the most famous victory in history.”

  The following day, German forces, employing some of the very tactics Charles de Gaulle had advocated, breached the Meuse and plunged through the heavily wooded Ardennes, bypassing the Maginot Line. Eight months after France declared war on the Third Reich, the fighting had finally started.

  The French army, powerful on paper, was overwhelmed. Though it had more tanks than the Germans, they were spread out thinly and ineffectually, “ready, like a lot of small corks, to plug holes in the line,” one historian noted.

  Nevertheless, French forces fought the invaders bravely. “It’s good that it’s starting at last,” one soldier said. “We can beat the Boches and have it over by autumn.”

  In fact, it would be over much sooner, but not the way he expected.

  * * *

  TWO

  Nomads

  AS THE LAST RESCUE BOATS DISAPPEARED, SO TOO did any hopes Gaston Huet had that he and his men might be saved.

  It was May 24, 1940, and at the port of Calais on France’s northwestern coast, tens of thousands of French and British soldiers were trapped by German forces, their backs to the sea. At that moment, Huet, a thirty-year-old French army lieutenant, would have given just about anything to be back in the Loire Valley, tending his vineyard in Vouvray.

  It had already been a long war for Huet. A year and a half earlier, he had been among the first to be called up during the Munich crisis. Since that time, he had been home only once, for his daughter’s first birthday. Now, with enemy forces closing in, Huet wondered when, or even if, he would see his family again.

  Huet headed a transport company which had been dispatched to Belgium just before the invasion to fetch badly needed gasoline supplies for French forces. That mission became impossible, however, when motorized German infantry units backed by tanks and air support swept into France, overrunning Holland and Belgium as well.

  “When we got to Flanders, we found that the Belgians had blown up the gas reservoir to prevent it from falling into enemy hands,” Huet said.

  With communications down and the Germans moving at incredible speed, it was difficult to know which way to turn. Huet decided to push his company south and try to get back to France. The route, he quickly discovered, had been cut by German tanks, so he turned back north toward Antwerp, only to find virtually every road blocked by a crushing tangle of panic-stricken refugees. In desperation, Huet decided that he and his 200 men should make a run for the port of Calais on the English Channel, where, Huet hoped, they could find a boat that could evacuate them to England.

  “About twenty miles from Calais, I ordered my men to begin dispersing our trucks and supplies to keep them out of German hands,” Huet said. Some of the trucks were driven into woods while others were pushed into gullies, but not before a few essential supplies were unloaded, such as food, water and thirty cases of Vouvray, wine which Huet had brought from home “to fortify the men whenever necessary.” After stuffing a few bottles into their packs, th
e company set off again.

  The sight that greeted them at Calais was a nightmare. There on the beach were thousands of British and French soldiers waiting—hoping—to be evacuated. But no vessels were in sight, not even a single fishing boat. Huet’s heart began to sink. “I did not know what to do,” he said. “There was absolutely no place for us to go. On one side was the English Channel, on the other were the Germans.”

  A massive evacuation was just beginning only twenty-five miles away at Dunkirk but “we knew nothing about it,” said Huet, “and even if we had, it would have been impossible for us to get there.” All escape routes had been closed and now, suddenly, German fighter-bombers had begun attacking troops on the beach. And they were not the only ones; British planes were bombing them too. “They thought that the Germans had already taken over and that we were Germans,” Huet said.

  Amidst the fire and smoke, several small British navy boats appeared. The masses trapped on the beach edged closer to the surf, with some of the men plunging into the water, trying to swim to the boats. The boats, however, were too small and could hold only a few hundred people. With priority going to the British, Huet and his men never had a chance. Someone from one of the vessels shouted that they would try to return, but it never happened.