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

by Donald Kladstrup

  Vineyards suffered as well. American tanks ground through fences and vines, some setting off land mines and unexploded shells as they attempted to drive the Germans back.

  Similar scenes were taking place in towns and villages throughout Alsace. In Ammerschwihr, heavy bombardment by Allied planes sent residents scurrying to their wine cellars for safety. Dozens found shelter in the cellar of the Kuehn wine firm, whose name, ironically, was the Cave de l’Enfer, the Cellar of Hell. They were not alone, because the cave had already been filled with statues of saints from one of Ammerschwihr’s churches. The statues had been placed there for safety. (People still refer to it as the time when the saints went to hell.)

  The real inferno was upstairs. Fires burned everywhere as American planes, having spotted two German tanks, repeatedly bombed the sixteenth-century town in the belief that the Germans still held it. The Americans did not realize that the tanks had been abandoned and that all of the Germans had left.

  As terrified residents tried to put out the fires, the water suddenly stopped as wells ran dry. A bomb had hit the reservoir. In desperation, people began hauling bottles and barrels of wine from their cellars, hooking hoses to the casks and spraying the contents on the fires. Jean Adam was thirteen years old as he helped his mother and father try to save the family winery. “The wine we were using was pretty generic, very low in alcohol because harvests had been so bad, so it didn’t cause any explosions,” Jean said. “But it might have been different if we had been using Gewürztraminer.”

  With their wine, the Adams were able to save their stable and animals but very little else. It was the same throughout Ammerschiwihr. Eighty-five percent of the town and many of the surrounding vineyards were destroyed.

  In Riquewihr, Georges Hugel looked at the destruction with sadness and pain. He had witnessed the brutality of war as a German soldier on the Russian front, and nothing, he felt, could ever be as bad as that. But seeing his own home threatened and his friends and neighbors under attack convinced him there was something more he had to do. “I’m going back to war,” he told his family. “I’m joining the French army.”

  It was the worst news his parents could have imagined: one son still fighting for the Germans, and now one with the Allies.

  * * *

  NINE

  Eagle’s Nest

  WHERE ARE THE FRENCH?

  That was the question nearly every American soldier was asking as Allied forces moved through Germany.

  With the war in its final days, the Allies were moving swiftly toward Berlin. Everyone, the Americans, British, French, Canadians and Russians, wanted to get there first.

  Another race was under way as well, this one across southern Germany toward Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Alps. For the French, the route held deep historical significance. It was the same path Napoleon took when his armies scored a great victory over the Austrians in Ulm in 1805. For a brief time, from 1809 to 1810, the region, including Berchtesgaden, had been under French rule.

  History, however, was only part of the reason Berchtesgaden was so important. Of far greater importance was the treasure everyone knew was there. It included gold, currency from a dozen countries, priceless jewelry, masterpieces of art, luxury cars and something the French could hardly wait to get their hands on: hundreds of thousands of bottles of the world’s greatest wine, wine that had been stolen from their country.

  Berchtesgaden may have been Hitler’s hideaway and the place where Himmler, Göring, Goebbels and others of the Nazi leadership had flocked for vacations, but it was also a storehouse, a veritable maze of underground cellars and passages that had been carved out for salt mines in the twelfth century. Now it served as a vast warehouse for loot the Nazis had collected during the war.

  The race to recover that treasure began on April 22, 1945, when General Philippe Leclerc got the green light to take his 2nd Armored Division back to Germany. Earlier that month, he had been pulled back to France by Charles de Gaulle, who decided he did not want to have any part of the country in the hands of Germans when Germany finally surrendered.

  There were still several pockets of resistance, the main one around Royan on the tip of the Médoc peninsula, where German troops had orders to hold out until the last bullet. Royan was a vital piece of real estate because it controlled traffic entering and leaving the port of Bordeaux. Without it, the Bordelais would have no way of shipping their wine to the rest of the world. Leclerc’s orders were to clean it out.

  He was furious. This was not where he wanted to be; the main action was in Germany. Leclerc, who had liberated Paris and Strasbourg, wanted to be there for the kill. He got de Gaulle to agree that as soon as his forces captured Royan, he would be sent right back to Germany.

  Royan surrendered on April 18. Four days later, Leclerc and his men were on their way. Their dash across France was unprecedented. In a letter to his wife, Leclerc wrote, “It will be terrible for my men if we miss this epic moment by only a few meters.” He was determined that would not happen. In just five days, Leclerc and his division had covered more than a thousand kilometers and crossed the Rhine into Germany.

  To get into the action as quickly as possible, Leclerc agreed to break his division into separate units and attach them to American forces. His 5th Tactical Group was assigned to the American 21st Army Corps, whose destination was Berchtesgaden.

  Side by side, like horses in a starting gate, they set off for the Bavarian town, each side determined to get there first.

  Fearing the French might beat them, American commanders assigned the 5th Tactical Group a more distant objective, Salzburg, which was across the river from Berchtesgaden.

  Not to be outmaneuvered, Leclerc ostensibly accepted the orders but broke his group into three subgroups. Two went to Salzburg as the Americans instructed. The third kept moving toward Berchtesgaden. Its mission: get there before the Americans.

  It did not take long for the Americans to realize that something was not quite right. The French unit that was supposed to be advancing on their right flank, the third subgroup, kept popping in and out of sight. Then it vanished altogether. When the Americans tried to make radio contact, there was only silence.

  “After begging to hook up with us, they just disappeared,” grumbled one GI. “One minute they were here, the next they were gone.”

  By the time the Americans realized what had happened, the French were 200 kilometers down the road and closing in on their destination.

  On May 4, with Berchtesgaden tantalizingly close—it was only fifty kilometers away—the Americans finally caught up. The French, they saw, had been held up at a ravine, pinned down by long-range fire from the SS. This was their big chance, the Americans decided. Turning their convoy around, they decided to take a more roundabout route to Berchtesgaden, the autobahn, gambling that the new fast highway Hitler had built to move his troops more quickly to the front would get them there first.

  It was a bad decision. Late that afternoon, they ran into a bridge that had been blown out and were forced to spend the night there while engineers struggled to repair the structure.

  The French, not wanting to take casualties at this late stage of the war, sat patiently at their position and waited out the SS. When the Germans ran out of ammunition and scattered, the French were on the move again.

  Late that afternoon, a French tank column entered Berchtesgaden without firing a shot. It was led by a young man from Champagne. Bernard de Nonancourt could hardly believe he was there.

  His first sight of Berchtesgaden on that fourth of May took his breath away. It was just as another visitor had described, “a fairy-tale land with snowcapped mountains, dark green woods, tinkling icy creeks and gingerbread houses which were a delight for the eye.” According to legend, somewhere in the crags of those mountains were Barbarossa and his knights, lying in an enchanted sleep. One day, it was said, Barbarossa would awake and usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity for Germany. That time had not y
et come. As Barbarossa slept on, Adolf Hitler plunged the country into war and ruin.

  It was at Berchtesgaden that many of his plans for a Thousand-Year Reich were first conceived. Over the years, the idyllic setting was converted into a fortress. His rustic little chalet became a monumental retreat bristling with antiaircraft guns and even a smoke-generating machine that enveloped the area in a vast cloud whenever there was danger of an air raid. Trees were chopped down so that forest paths could be turned into paved roads. Tiny votive chapels and villas were ripped out to make room for ugly concrete buildings that housed troops, guests and a fleet of fancy cars.

  But Hitler’s most self-indulgent fantasy was an elevator that could carry him to Eagle’s Nest, his private mountaintop retreat several thousand feet above Berchtesgaden. According to biographer Robert Payne, “It occurred to Hitler that the mountain could be tunneled in such a way that he could be propelled up to the summit in an elevator, thus permitting him to survey the surrounding landscape like a god surveying all the kingdoms of the earth.”

  It took workmen three years to cut the shaft out of solid rock. The elevator they installed had a gold-plated door, carpeted floor and cushioned seats. A bank of phones linked it with Berlin, Paris, London and every other important city in the world. Although the project cost 30 million marks, Hitler was pleased. It was a present he had given himself for his fiftieth birthday.

  Unfortunately, by the time Bernard de Nonancourt and his men arrived, the elevator was out of order. The retreating Germans had sabotaged it.

  Perched on the rim of his tank, Bernard gazed toward the mountain peak, mesmerized by the beauty. Eagles flew in slow circles above the 8,000-foot summit, their wings glowing in the fading sunlight. It had been a long day, but it was not quite over.

  “You, de Nonancourt, over here!” It was his commanding officer. Bernard slid down from his tank and hurried over to report. “You’re from Champagne, right? So you must know something about wine.” Bernard nodded and was about to answer when the officer continued, “We have a special assignment for you. You’re going mountain climbing tomorrow.” The officer explained that military intelligence believed that much of the wine the Nazis had stolen from France had been stashed in Eagle’s Nest. “I want you to take a team up and see what’s there. Get some rest since you’ll be starting early. It won’t be an easy climb.”

  It took a few moments for the officer’s words to sink in. Then Bernard realized he was about to enter a place where few others had ever set foot. No one knew for certain what was there or what condition it was in. The retreating SS had already flooded the cellars of several villas with gasoline and set them on fire. What had they done to Eagle’s Nest? he wondered.

  Although Berchtesgaden had been the target of Allied bombing runs in recent days, Bernard and several other soldiers found a chalet that was still intact and began unloading their equipment. For the first time in weeks, they would be sleeping in beds.

  But Bernard could not sleep. Instead, he pulled out a sheet of paper and began writing a letter to his mother. So much had happened that it had been difficult to stay in touch. Now he found there was so much he could not tell her. How could he explain the things he had to do as a commando in the Resistance? How could he ever describe the horrors he had seen at Dachau when his army unit helped liberate that camp? “I know how you felt after we lost Maurice,” he wrote. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my brother and what this struggle has cost all of us, but I can now say for certain that fighting in this war was the right thing for me to do.”

  Bernard woke his men before dawn. General Leclerc had arrived during the night and he had one more order for the men who would be scaling the mountain. He wanted the French flag raised over Eagle’s Nest.

  The first part of the journey was the easiest. Bernard and his team drove from Berchtesgaden to a teahouse further up the mountain, about twenty minutes away. There was a parking lot there and an entrance to the elevator Hitler had built. Bernard double-checked with engineers who had been sent up earlier to see if there was any way of repairing it. It is impossible, they told him.

  Bernard and his team began climbing. It was warm and the going was slow in the early morning light. Often, the men had to stop while an advance group checked the slope for mines and booby traps.

  Within a couple of hours, the men were finding it difficult to breathe. That was one of Hitler’s complaints and why he himself rarely visited Eagle’s Nest. The air, he said, was too thin.

  A few hundred feet from the summit, the path became steeper. Bernard sent a squad of Alpine climbers ahead to drop ropes. Then, one by one, the men hauled themselves up the face of the cliff.

  All were exhausted by the time they reached the top. Even at an altitude of 8,000 feet, it was still warm. The view, however, was magnificent and the men paused to take in the sight while they tried to catch their breath.

  From the outside, Eagle’s Nest was dull, almost nondescript, not unlike a bunker. Bernard realized at once it would not be easy getting inside. The entrance, a steel door, was jammed. Tugging on it availed nothing, and sledgehammers had no effect either. Bernard stood aside as engineers set off a small charge of explosives. When the smoke and dust had cleared, the door stood slightly ajar. Everyone squeezed through; Bernard headed for the cave.

  Once again, there was a door to open. Like the first, it refused to give, but finally Bernard forced his way through.

  Inside was dark. Bernard switched on his flashlight. It took him only a few seconds to realize what was there. He shouted for the others to come. “You’re not going to believe this!” he said. Wherever Bernard pointed his flashlight, there were bottles, some in wooden cases, others on iron racks.

  The other men rushed in with their flashlights; the sight before them was overwhelming. It was an enormous room filled from floor to ceiling with wine. “There was every great wine I had ever heard of, every legendary vintage,” Bernard later said. “Everything that had been made by the Rothschilds was there, the Lafites, the Moutons. The Bordeaux were just extraordinary.”

  Bernard made a quick calculation. There had to be at least a half million bottles, many of them magnums.

  The Bordeaux, however, were only part of it. There was also outstanding Burgundies as well as rare ports and cognacs dating from the nineteenth century. Bottles from every major champagne house were there too: Krug, Bollinger, Moët, Piper-Heidsieck and Pommery, all of the grand marques. And then Bernard spotted Lanson, the house his uncle owned. “I helped make that champagne,” Bernard thought to himself.

  But that was not what surprised him most. “What I really remember is the 1928 Salon, that unforgettable champagne. It was so good and there were only minute quantities of it.” Nearly five years earlier, Nonancourt had watched Göring’s men haul that very champagne away when he was working at Delamotte, a champagne house across the street from Salon.

  Bernard touched some of the bottles as if to convince himself it was real. Then he started to laugh. Some of the champagne, he saw, was little more than plonk. There were huge numbers of bottles stamped “Reserved for the Wehrmacht”; others were labeled only Category A, B or C to designate quality. They represented one-third of all the sales of champagne from 1937 through 1940, an amount the Wehrmacht had requisitioned to “maintain the morale of its troops.” Those bottles, Bernard knew, were ones producers used to get rid of their worst champagne.

  Now, Bernard had a problem to solve: how to get a half million bottles of wine down a mountain. He called to the engineers. “Are you sure that elevator isn’t working? Are you positive there’s no way to fix it?” They shook their heads, explaining that the damage was so extensive that repairing it required more equipment than they were carrying.

  Then Bernard remembered a certain group of men who knew how to handle things carefully, especially in the most difficult circumstances. He radioed for medics. “And bring all the stretchers you can find,” he said.

  What happened ne
xt constituted one of the most bizarre wartime evacuations ever mounted, an exercise that would involve more than two hundred soldiers and take several days to complete. Cases of wine were lugged out of Eagle’s Nest and strapped onto the stretchers. With help from the Alpine team, the stretchers were carefully lowered a few hundred meters from the peak to where pairs of stretcher-bearers waited below. The stretchers were then carried slowly down the mountain to where tanks, trucks and other military vehicles were waiting. Bernard scrambled to get ahead, stopping at times to watch as the strange procession of stretchers, each one loaded with wine, wound its way down the slope.

  Bernard reached his tank just before the first stretcher of wine arrived. “Bring that one over here,” he ordered, motioning the stretcher-bearers to his tank. “Faites le plein [fill ’er up],” he said. The men lifted a case off the stretcher and handed it to Bernard on the turret. It was a case of 1928 Salon champagne.